Every year our school puts together what we call a "Literary Magazine" in which every single student gets to publish a piece of writing. This year, since we adopted Lucy Calkins and our kids have written so much the Literacy Team decided to have kids polish off their favorite pieces and submit them for the magazine. Of course, this meant that us teachers got to make sure that every single essay was perfect, which took forever, but it opened my eyes to something pretty important and it was actually kind of fun!
I gave my students back all of the writing that they have done this year and we were all impressed by just how much they have written. I think we counted that they had written at least ten five-paragraph essays! I told each of them to pick their favorite piece and then we went over some basics of editing and revising.
MANY of the mistakes that my kids made were on things that I should have taught them this year. I am ashamed to admit that I did not really explicitly teach grammar a.k.a. usage and mechanics this year unless I noticed that everyone happened to be making the same mistake and gave an impromptu lesson. So, I decided that fourth quarter would be the perfect time to squeeze this in (especially since we already took our end of year writing assessment)!
I went all the way back to the first quarter standards and taught them how to use possessive nouns properly in their writing using this little packet that I created. (FREEBIE ALERT)
Then, I had them check their writing to see if they made any possessive noun mistakes and I was so proud of them for identifying them, referring to what I called their "cheat sheet", and fixing them without my help!
Because I was so happy with how this lesson worked out, I decided to keep going and this week we worked on the next standard: comparisons with adjectives and adverbs. You can see the "cheat sheet" below and click on it to grab the whole packet from my TPT store.
I am hoping to get as many of these standards covered as possible in the next 6 weeks that we have left, so if you like these, stay tuned! I'm planning to post them one by one as I create them and then I'll bundle them all together and hopefully create a workbook to use throughout the entire school year next year.
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