*Mini-lessons with Stories that Need to Be Edited*

Currently, I am not a full time teacher, but I do teach writing to fourth graders two times a week for an hour as part of my Master's Project. I have been implementing the writing process for the last 4 weeks. I began to notice that my students were not correctly editing each other's papers. Then, I realized that I taught them about editing, but I did not teach them how to do it. Many teachers teach grammar and writing separatley. Since my teacher wanted me to focus on the students basic skills in writing, grammar had to be included somehow.

This week I did an activity with the class that actually worked, and I think it can be easily implemented into any teachers writing lesson. I gave the class a story that contained many mechanical errors in it. I modeled how to give constructive criticism to their peers when they reached the editing stage in the writing process. I told the students to pretend that the story in front of them was the person sitting next to them's paper. I asked each student to tell the student sitting next to them what errors they see in the story. We practiced giving constructive criticism and pointing out grammatical errors in a story.

Next, I numbered half the students as ones and half of them as twos. The ones got one story with errors on it and the twos got a different story with errors on it. I told the students to find a partner that did not have their name story. My next directions was to have them pretend that they wrote the story in front of them and they were in the editing stage. Partner one had to tell partner two using constructive criticism what type of errors there were in their story. They could not switch papers and they could not correct their own papers. They had to work together one at a time to fix "their" stories. Whoever made all the corrections on both stories recieved a piece of candy.

They really liked this activity, and it was very beneficial. Instead of doing grammar worksheets with separate sentences, I think students should practice editing by correcting errors in a story. These can be done with 15 minute mini-lessons and correct a different story as much as time allows. Sometimes have students work together, other times they can edit on their own, and other times you can do this activity as a whole class. This activity can also be integrated into different subjects. Reading separate sentences and focusing on one concept at a time is different than reading a story and focusing on helping another person fix their errors. Finding errors in a story, I think, will help them more during the editing stage in the writing process. They also begin getting used to the types of mistakes that are seen in their classmate's stories which makes it even more beneficial. Next Tuesday, I am having them edit each other's stories they wrote today. I think reminding them of how to edit like the activity we did today and how to give constructive critcism is really going to help them work together and improve in their grammatical skills. If this continues to be very beneficial, I will definetly recommend it to the teachers who work at my school. I will let you all know how it goes!