by: Janet Blaylock
Teaching primary children to edit is an important aspect in writing. Children need to learn how to write and then edit their own work before submitting their assignments. This will help them as they continue their education and develop their writing skills.
However, before they learn how to edit their own work, they need to learn the following: Grammar, Sentence Structure, Paragraph Structure, and Spelling. Once they have learned the basics in these areas, they will learn how to edit their writing. If they don’t understand the basic rules, they will have trouble knowing how to edit.
Let’s Start with Grammar
First, you need to teach children about the parts of speech such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and then focus on subjects and verbs. You can provide worksheets on the parts of speech so you can see if the students understand this concept.
After you have taught the students the parts of speech, you need to teach them the basic punctuation marks so they can write sentences correctly. They should learn about periods, question marks, exclamation marks, commas, semi-colons, and colons. You can also provide worksheets on punctuation so that students can punctuate sentences correctly.
Once students understand these mark, they are ready to learn how to write sentences correctly, but they need to understand the Parts of Speech. You can also make worksheets on the parts of speech and have them write out the answers and then practice editing their work before they submit them to you.
Sentence Structure
After they are familiar with the parts of speech, they can learn how to write sentences. One way to do this is to give students worksheets and have them write complete sentences. When the worksheets are completed, they can edit their own sentences to make sure they are correct. This will help increase their editing skills.
Paragraph Structure
Now that they have learned how to edit their sentences, they can stretch their editing skills to paragraph structure. You can have them learn how to edit paragraphs by giving them worksheets where they have to find the mistakes in each paragraph. You can also provide a large passage and have them insert paragraphs where they need to be so students will learn how to organize a paragraph as well as editing them.
Spelling
Finally, students need to learn how to spell words correctly. You can teach them spelling by giving them words to study and then spelling tests on a weekly basis. If they misspell any words, they need to write those words at least five times and then take the test again. It’s important to teach children how to spell correctly so they can edit their work accurately.
Editing
When they have completed the steps to editing, they are ready to take on a larger assignment with more than one paragraph such as a book report, short story, or other type of writing. You can help students learn this by providing a short story for them to edit. In the short story, you will have made several errors, and they will need to locate the mistakes and correct them.
To conclude, students will learn editing by learning the basic steps first and then they can progress to editing their work.
Editor: Michael R. Clarke
