editing+writing

Just before half term I got the children to write a story for assessment and the results from this were pretty dire, even after we had been through what to include to make it really fantastic. So I wrote my own story which was even worse than theirs; wrong punctuation all over the place, wrong spellings, weak vocab, and made sure it was a level 2/3 borderline. On Monday I presented them with the story and the sheet of 'I can' statements I had used to assess their stories and gave them 5 minutes to work out a level with evidence. They did this really well but then the fun part - editing to make it better. I put them all in random mixed ability groups and off we marched to the ICT suite where the story was on the computers. There I gave each group a card (9 cards in total, all with a different heading and short explanation of what to do eg punctuation, spelling, detail about character and setting, vocabulary) and 5 minutes to sort out the the problem in the story based on what card they had. After 5 minutes all passed card on to next person until they'd had all the cards. There was a real buzz in the room, all children were on task whole time and results were brilliant! (squiggle7)

This sounds great! I am doing something similar next week, we are covering newspapers in year 4 for the second time this year so I have taken their reports that they wrote before Christmas and have photocopied and enlarged them so they can edit them. We are going to write our sucess criteria out again then edit them in pairs sticking to the criteria using gel pens as a special treat. Hope it works, normally they are awful at editing - one read through and they think it's perfect! smileystar

I think this sounds really great too...any chance you could add the resources for this? Thanks! **~Jog_on**

Took a bit of searching but I finally found them: This is my very dire story!

These are the cards they each spent 5 minutes working on. I just printed them out, backed them and laminated them. Most of the things on the cards we had covered several times throughout the year in literacy which is why not all of the cards have specific examples on them. ~**squiggle7**