FIVE Quick and Easy Ways to Revise with Young Writers

Writing with my first graders is a fun, beautiful, and messy process that I love!  It’s not always easy to get young writers to make important and needed changes to their pieces, so I’m here to share some of the ways we start this process at the beginning of the year with our personal narratives.
To begin, I introduce revising as “making changes to a piece to make it better” and I do a ton of modeling with my own pieces and shared pieces we’ve written together.  We discuss how to make our writing clear and interesting for our readers.  These strategies are introduced during my whole group writing lesson and then individualized during one-on-one or small group conferencing.

 #1 Speech Bubbles, Thinking Bubbles, and Labels

We start on day one by adding labels to our pictures.  I use mentor texts that have “words in the pictures”, I model with my own writing pieces, and we do some interactive labeling.  At the beginning of the year, we usually begin by labeling the people in our drawings:  Mom, Dad, Me, Kim.  It’s a great way to draw more out of emergent or reluctant writers and make them feel successful from the start. 
This can then lead to students labeling the places that they go with either common or proper nouns:  park, store, McDonalds, movie theater, Redondo Beach, etc.
Speech and thinking bubbles are a natural and easy way for students to add meaning to their writing by adding to their picture.  It’s as simple as me asking, “What did you say?” or “What was he thinking?”  They often have a lot of fun with this one and are always on the lookout for speech and thinking bubbles in our reading, too.
When students are using these daily in their writing pieces, it’s easy to use as a revising tool because it’s something they are already familiar with.

#2 Feeling Sentences

Feeling sentences are a great way to show a sense of closure, but we also work on adding sentences that tell how we feel throughout the piece.  Often, this looks very simple at the beginning of the year. My students usually start out with sentences such as “I felt happy” or “I was sad”, but it leads to rich discussions and more descriptive feeling sentences in the future.
When they begin adding conjunctions and connecting words to these feeling sentences, we really get some great content:  “I felt really happy when I kicked the ball into the net!”

#3 Adjectives

Adding adjectives is a fun and easy way for young students to add to their pieces.  I make a simple anchor chart that tells how adjectives can describe a noun:  How many?  What color?  What size? What does it sound/look/taste/feel/smell like?  Adjectives are doable for even my most emergent writers. 
The sentence “I love my dog” can quickly turn into “I love my big brown dog.”  We add “use adjectives” to our checklist and then students know they should be adding an adjective to most of their sentences in each piece.

#4 Connecting Words

Connecting words, or conjunctions, are an easy way for young writers to begin writing compound and complex sentences.  We use the Whole Brain Teaching symbol idea of linking our fingers together when we add a connecting word to our writing. 
We start with words that students use a lot when speaking and I teach them how to put them into their writing:  and, so, because, or, but, when.  These connecting words also go up on a simple chart for student reference. We do a lot of oral practice together, so that using these connecting words becomes second nature to my students.

#5 Fantastic Endings

Young students often have a difficult time wrapping up their writing and showing a clear sense of closure, but this can be an easy fix and a great place to “end with a bang!”  As a Lucy Calkins lover, I introduce endings by reminding students that they need to “stay close to the rest of the story”.  Endings such as “Then I went home” or “Then I went to bed” or “The end” are not acceptable to end a story about a cool encounter with a crab on the beach or an exciting ride at the amusement park. 
We start right away with making sure our ending is still “about” the rest of the story.  Some ways to do this are:

• Write a feeling sentence
• Tell how that specific event ended
• Tell what someone said
• Share what the writer thought about the event or activity
• State their future plan based on this event (i.e. I can’t wait to try it again!)

Students love to fix up “lame” endings and are fabulous about brainstorming lots of ideas for fantastic endings!  I hope this is helpful for you!  Happy Writing!!