The Rookery

The Herons are in the midst of revising and editing their essays about their countries.  It’s a time consuming process and I have them use a Revision and Editing Checklist.  By the time they’re finished, they’ll have re-read their writing upwards of eight times. 

Careful revision and editing is a skill that most fourth graders are just beginning to be able to do independently.  When younger students write something it’s “done” and it’s very hard for young writers to see another way that it could have been written (much less decide that the alternative might be better).  Upper elementary students, however, begin to gain the perspective they need to see their work as changeable.  Our revision process helps students find the focus of a paragraph, cut what doesn’t fit within that focus, move things to make sense, ask a friend to find a few places to add detail and finally, develop a topic sentence.

I find that engaging in the editing process regularly provides an authentic reason for students to strive for accuracy in their first drafts.  It’s such a pain to add period after period to a piece during editing instead of dropping them in as you write.  But it’s only when work is edited regularly that students see the rational for being as careful as you’re able in a first draft.

We use Ralph Fletcher’s colored pencil approach to editing.  Students take a red pen and mark punctuation.  To help them break up those run-on sentences, they have to get special permission to have a sentence with more than one “and.”  A green pen marks capitalization changes.  A blue pen circles words that may not be spelled correctly.  Students read the piece from the end to the beginning so their brains don’t gloss over misspellings.

The Herons take pride in their rainbow hued drafts full of arrows and cuts.  It’s a sign that they’re beginning to write in a more sophisticated way, one that considers the reader.