Although it can be repetitive, my kids have definitely made a lot of progress. They are eager to share their fixes and be sentence detectives. I have noticed students' writing improve; they are spelling sight words more accurately, including quotations in their stories, and using contractions. I think that this daily activity will really benefit my students when we are editing during Writer's Workshop in the upcoming week.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Behrman-Week 11
My students edit two sentences every morning (Daily Oral Language) as a part of their Bell Ringer. While this activity tends to take longer than the budgeted time slot, I have noticed that an immense amount of learning goes on during this time period. Not only are students working to sound out/decode unfamiliar words independently, but also critically analyze the sentences for spelling errors, grammatical errors, and mechanical errors. When students volunteer their "fixes" to the sentences, I ask them to explain it and achieve a deeper level understanding. For example, if a student says we need to capitalize the first letter in the word "molly," they know that the expectation is for them to explain that molly is the name of a person/proper noun, so we have to capitalize it. We have also been using hand signals and lots of echo response to teach concepts such as apostrophes, commas, quotations marks, compound words, and contractions.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
One natural suggestion to make to this type of activity is to allow students to bring in their own sentences to critique. In this way, not only will they be engaged with the content, but it will be meaningful because they are engaging in something that is relevant to them (Where might these "real-world" sentences come from? What purpose might they serve in the students lives?)
ReplyDelete