Turn Your Students into Writing Detectives

At Writing with Design we believe that the hand doing the correcting is attached to the brain doing the learning. So when teachers make editing corrections on student writing, it's the teachers who are learning and practicing the grammar rules, not the students.

Instead, we like to take a more detective approach to having students find their grammar bloopers. One idea is when students are writing shorter pieces, less than five sentences, for each of their sentences, identify how many capitalization, punctuation, or spelling bloopers you find.

So for example: In sentence one there was zero, in sentence two there was one spelling blooper, in sentence three there was zero, in sentence four there were two capitalization and in sentence five there was one capitalization blooper.

This way, your students must go back and look in their writing to figure out where the issues are. Focus on one area of grammar or conventions at a time, until your students aren't producing a ton of errors. Then, when you get to larger pieces, the amount of correcting isn't overwhelming.

“Instead, we like to take a more detective approach to having students find their grammar bloopers.”

Ready to try Writing with Design's novel approach to creating adept, confident writers in your class! Give us a shout!