Reading Writing Day 10
Writing Circles: Reading Aloud to Edit for Sentence Boundaries Materials: Objectives Students will be able to: • Work collaboratively with their writing circle to edit their piece; and • Read aloud to edit for sentence boundaries.
Preparation
• Students’ writing notebooks • Pens, pencils • Signs for each circle • Chart for norms (collaborative work - See Day 2) • Chart for reflections (See Day 3)
You already chose a student to help you model the strategy in today’s minilesson. You will need to show the student’s writing to your students, either by typing it as is into a Word document that you can project from your computer, or by using a document camera or overhead. If you have none of these options available, make photocopies or copy a few sentences onto the board or chart paper. Practice reading it aloud in a way that emphasizes the punctuation, even if the punctuation is wrong.
Instructional Activities Minilesson Now that students have revised their piece, they are ready to edit, the last step before publishing. Tell students that professional writers work with copy editors who catch all their mistakes. Today they will be copy editors for each other in their circles. It’s hard to see mistakes because we see what we expect to see. One way to make sure we notice what needs to be fixed is to read the piece aloud. That is especially helpful to make sure we’ve used punctuation and paragraphing to match our breathing and thinking: a comma for a short pause, a period for the full stop after a sentence, a new paragraph and an even longer pause for a new idea. Model with the student writing that you prepared and a colored pen or pencil. You can also use post-its if you or your writers are uncomfortable with the idea of writing on someone else’s draft. Remind students of the norms for collaborative work (chart).
Chicago Public Schools - Summer Bridge 2011
87