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| Walk'N'Talk in ACTION! |
I always tell my students to read their writing out loud.
I know that when I read my writing out loud, I always find the places where I should’ve put a comma, where I’ve missed some simple spelling, even where I’ve missed a word (I’m not sure how that happens by the way, but it seems to be something I do a lot! Especially when I text talk my writing first). Anyway, I'm a broken record on this. I’ll ask my students, "What is one thing you could do to make your editing process better?" and they will invariably say, "Read my work aloud!" sometimes they even chorus it. And then they never do it.
Ever.
So there’s a disconnect. A big one! They can spout off the answers, but don't do it.
And then, this week, off the top of my head, off-the-cuff, in the middle of a lesson, I found a way to make it happen.
We were coming to the end of writing time for an informative essay when a student came up to tell me that he was finished with his writing. I looked over the writing quickly, and I saw that the writing was replete with errors, even though the 'voice' side of things was pretty good. So without really thinking about it, I said, "Why don’t you go walk up and down the hallway, and read this aloud to yourself. Just hold the computer out in front of you, look where you're going and read it a couple times. See if you can find any mistakes," and off he went. Then I had another student claim that they were finished. Again, I looked over the work quickly, and thought, maybe this is something I should do with everyone. So I gave the same instructions and off she went.
As I watch the students stopping and making corrections to the hallway, I thought… This has potential. So I quickly went to my computer and adjusted my instructions on the board. Now they read,
When you think that you are finished...
Visit Mrs. B for permission to
WALK'N'TALK!
Well, that got their attention - now they were excited.
I had to create rules-because they love it when they think it’s a real 'activity'.
So, here were the instructions.
- Walk the hallway three times. As you walk, read your work aloud.
- As you come across a mistake, stop, and stand still, both feet on one tile (I told them that this was very important - I couldn't help it, they were so serious).
- Make your corrections.
- Once corrected, you may continue.
- Keep walking, keep stopping to make corrections, keep walking, until you have walked and talked the hallways three times!
The results were unbelievable. Well, not really, when you consider that all writers know just how powerful reading work aloud is, but the kids were blown away. I had students telling me that they had found five or six mistakes - sidenote, they were amazed by this!! They told me they had fixed punctuation, found run on sentences, seen things that just didn't make sense...they were as excited as I was!
As I look over the finished work today, I realized how much 'cleaner' the essays were from the kids later in the day, after I implemented the Walk'N'Talk wholesaele.
I’m going to make this a permanent strategy, part of our editing list - and the next time I do it, I’m going to tally the number of edits they tell me they make. I think it would make for some interesting action research. Plus, how powerful this would be for the kids to see - to show them just how much this can help them with their writing.
#Powerful. #ItWasJustALastMinuteIdea #ThingsTheWork
