Materials are not required; see Lesson Plan section for materials that might be prepared in advance, including a transparency, chart, or student work sheet.
Lesson Plan
This activity can be used across the grades to reinforce language skills
that students have learned. When you find yourself with 20 minutes to
spare, this activity can be created on the spot and tied to a topic being
studied in the class. You can also prepare in advance several sets of
sentences or short stories to be used by a substitute or for you to use
at any time. Ideally these sentences/stories would be prepared on large
chart paper; if you have easy access to an overhead projector, they could
be prepared on a transparency. Another option: Prepare individual student
work sheets with the same text so students have a copy they can work on
and hold.
Editing
Resource
Have you seen Education World's Every-Day Edits resource? Here you'll find an activity to reinforce students' grammar, punctuation, and spelling skills for every day of the school year! Use this activity as a resource for this lesson, and revist this Education World feature often.
Here's how the simple activity works:
Divide students into teams of four or five.
Provide sentences, a story, or some other text that has in it numerous
"planted" errors of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. The text should
include a large number of errors that relate to grade-appropriate skills.
(This text should be presented on chart paper, an overhead transparency,
or individual student work sheets.)
Write a number from 1 to 10 on a sheet of paper, and ask one member
of each student team to call out a number. The team that comes closest
to the number you wrote without going over it will go first.
One member of the first team will identify an error in the text.
If that person correctly identifies an error, the student's team earns
a point. If the student is incorrect, the team loses a point.
Play moves in a clockwise direction. The next team identifies another
error, and play continues.
When play returns to the team that started the activity, the team
member who identified the first error cannot respond again. Another
member of the team must respond.
Eventually, there will be few errors left to identify. When the activity
gets to that point, you might permit all students on a team to discuss
the edits they might make and come to a consensus. It's important that
they talk quietly so not to give away additional edits to an opponent.
If edits remain to be made, the team must have a response or they lose
a point. Set a 30-second time limit for the team to come to agreement.
At the end of the game, the team with the most points is the winner.
Activity notes: Before the team activity begins, you might provide
each student with a work sheet that has on it the text for the activity.
Students will do the work sheet on their own before teams are created.
Or students can work together in their team units to identify as many
errors as they can.
Assessment
The day after doing this activity, you could hand out a copy of the activity and
let students do the activity on their own. In this follow-up activity, students
should be able to identify 90 percent or more of the errors in the text.
