Writing feels like an overwhelming subject to teach, no matter what grade level you are in {it’s not just me, right?!}. But in the younger grades, it can feel especially daunting. Your students are starting with almost nothing. And the expectations of where they need to be by the end of kindergarten, first grade, and then second grade are huge! Oh, the pressure!
Think about where a kindergartener starts and what they are expected to be writing in only three years’ time by second grade. It’s a HUGE jump! But rather than letting myself get overwhelmed by the task of growing my students as writers, I focus on taking things in tiny steps, one day at a time.
Today, I have a teaching tool that I use to grow my writers exponentially throughout the year, and it only takes a few minutes a day: Daily Edits!
Daily Edit Journals
Daily Edits are journals with writing warm-ups for kids. They are given one sentence a day to edit for writing conventions. For example, the sentence may say “did you stay up until midnight”. Your students will work to rewrite the sentence correctly and check off the errors they fixed with a checklist.
This practice does several things: First, it gets your students writing. The simple act of writing will grow their handwriting skills and build their writing fluency when it comes to letter formation. Second, it spiral reviews all of the writing mechanics you’ve taught so far this year. They are thinking about capitalization and punctuation, as well as finger spaces. Finally, it warms them up for a bigger writing lesson where you can build upon the skills they just reviewed. Rather than diving right into a lesson where you will later have to go back and remind them to add punctuation, you get that out of the way first!
Ways to Use Daily Edits
To see the best results from Daily Edits, I recommend creating a routine with them. Choose a certain number of days of the week where you will let students edit a sentence before you teach your writing lesson of the day. This may be daily, if you have a devoted writing block each day. This may be a couple of times a week. Either way, I would create the same routine around completing the edit and then talking about what the Senate should’ve looked like so students know how to simply pull out their journal and get started.
You can use these Daily Edits as morning work as well. This would be a great thing to have students working on as they come in and unpack. Then, you could use your morning meeting time to review the correct answer. This would be a good way to make sure that students are doing the daily edits every single day, which is how you will see the most growth.
Related: Morning Work for 1st Graders
Get Started
If you want to get started with a daily editing routine in your classroom, you can grab my journals here! I have journals for every month of the year. You can grab the money-saving year long bundle, or grab the months that you need individually.
Each pack comes with 20 pre-made half-sheet sentences + a month-specific cover that you can simply copy, staple, and slice! It also includes an editable file that you can add in your own sentences.
My favorite way to use the September pack is to create sentences specific to my class so kids get a little buy-in from the beginning 🙂
Either way, daily edits are a great way to grow your writers through consistent, but brief, lessons!
Want to try a free week of Daily Edits? Enter your info below and I’ll send you a few days from the September Pack!
Happy teaching, everyone!
