The image featured above is from a sample I created for my Practicum students of an introductory paragraph for the Personal Narratives that we wrote. I wrote here about my experience in the UVic Field School called Redfish School of Change, demonstrating that this assignment could easily be aligned with the Social Studies Curriculum by having every student reflect on their connection to a place through story.
I chose this image because it shows how I used a “chunking” method with my students to walk them through editing and revising. This method is called rainbow editing, and we did this by using a different colour to find different parts of students work in order to consider what needed to be revised or edited. This step-by-step process ensures all students are caught up, and are active participants in the editing process. Through the colours, it gives them them a visual representation of their work, and will make them feel productive and successful. It also give me a good idea of which students understand what they are doing, and the types of things they should be circling and underlining. This is how I went about this:
RED: Add three descriptive words per page.
ORANGE: Underline all your powerful words.
YELLOW: Underline the first word of each sentence (to ensure variety in how sentences are started).
GREEN: Circle each capital letter.
BLUE: Circle periods, commas, questions marks, and exclamation points.
I will definitely do something like this again even with older students (my students were a grade 4/5 split). It really stood out for me how chunking activities and methods like this can really lead to the success of all students.
