Saturday, February 22, 2014

For the Love of Editing with a FREEBIE!



We actually had a full week of school this week!  We did have a 2-hour delay, but a whole week!!!   Which meant we were able to wrap up our opinion writing and get started with editing.  I don't know about you but editing for my little second graders is a toughy!  There are so many steps to the process, so it's hard to remember all the items on the editing checklist.  I decided my littles needed an easy way to remember what to look for.  I started using the acronym C.U.P.S.  Many of you may have heard of it, or even used it.  For those of you who are wondering...
C:  Capitals, U:  Understanding, P:  Punctuation, S:  Spelling.  
Easy peezy, Right!  When I introduced this to my littles I saw little light bulbs going off over their heads!  Finally, we could get past the understanding and get down to applying!  We took our opinion pieces and began editing one step at a time, and all together.  Using a cute little PowerPoint and mini-posters for each student, more about that late;), I started with C:  Capitals.  We went through our writing and looked for all of the components of capitalization:
1.  Do all of my sentences begin with a capital?
 2.  Do all of my proper nouns begin with a capital?
3.  Do all of the alone letter "I' begin with a capital?

Next, we went through our writing looking for all of the components of understanding:
1.  Do my sentences have fluency?
2.  Are my details organized with a beginning, middle, and end?
3.  Does my writing have enough details to help my reader understand?
To help with this part I broke out the whisper phones!  These are great for helping students edit for understanding.  Each student read their writing to them selves in the whisper phone which helped them to spot sentence fluency issues.


Then, we looked for all the components of punctuation:
1.  Do all of my sentences end with punctuation?
2.  Does my punctuation match my sentences?  Questions have a questing mark, statements have a period, and exclamations have an exclamation mark.

Last, but certainly not least, we looked for all the components of spelling"
1.  Did I underline words I wasn't sure of?
2.  Did I use my word wall to check these words?
3.  Did I stretch out the sounds of these words?
4.  Did I use a dictionary to look up the correct spelling of these words?
We went through each of these one by one as a whole group, after I modeled with my own writing.  It took us three days to understand what each meant, practice, and apply it to our own writing.  So worth the time!  Students received little bookmark style posters that I taped on their desks so they can have easy access and be reminded of this process!  You can find the posters for each part, the mini-posters for student desks, and a check-off sheet students can use and turn in for all of their writing here FREEBIE: Editing with C.U.P.S.  I would love to hear your strategies for editing, so please comment below:)

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