SUBJECT: Language Arts/English/Writing
GRADE: Third
TECHNOLOGY: Word Processor
BY: Allison Pollok

EDITING

Target Subject: Language Arts/English/Writing

Target Grade: This lesson is designed for a third grade class. One of the major goals of third grade is to get students to a point where they can move through the writing process reasonably independently. Students are learning to brainstorm ideas, research a topic, organize thoughts, write, edit, and revise. During the first part of the year, each of these skills was taught in isolation. During the second part of the year, students are writing their own pieces and moving through each of these phases at their own rate. This lesson could be used either as practice when the teacher is teaching the process of editing or during the second part of the year as a review.

Objectives:
Students will be able to:
1. Locate mistakes in a paragraph.
2. Correct mistakes in that paragraph.
3. Write an original paragraph.
4. Locate and correct mistakes in that original paragraph.

Materials:
Students will need:
* Classroom computer with teacher-written paragraph
* Disk or paper (to save work)

Lesson Plan:
This lesson plan is for independent practice in editing. Students should already know what to look for when editing a paragraph (things like misspelled words, capitalization, punctuation, run-on sentences, etc.) Furthermore, students should know how to use the word processing program, including the spell check and thesaurus features.

This lesson would take about 30 minutes and is to be done independently. If there is only one computer in the classroom, then only one student may work on the assignment at a time. If, however, this lesson plan is taught in a computer lab, then all students may be able to complete the assignment simultaneously.

Before the lesson, the teacher should type a paragraph with many mistakes, similar to the following:

next weak us will be goin to wahsington dc our nations capital this fild trip take us all day we will go to the us mint where the money is made to the american history musum and to the white house where mr and mrs clinton lives this fiels trip will very go along nicly with the book we read about washington dc i know we will do and see many excitng peple and things in On our trip

Instruct students how to find the paragraph on the computer (what it is located under). Have students read the paragraph and locate the mistakes. The student should correct the mistakes in the paragraph, using such tools as spell check when necessary.

Next, have the student write his/her own paragraph. The teacher may select a topic on which the student is to write or she may elect to have to student write on any topic he/she wishes. Specify that the paragraph must be at least five lines long. After the student has written his/her paragraph, have him/her edit it.

Finally, specify how you want to student to submit his/her work--either by printing out a hard copy or by saving it on disk.

Conclusion:
Students will have an opportunity to share their original paragraphs with the class.

Evaluation:
Read the paragraphs the students have corrected and written. In the corrected paragraphs, look to see if students have corrected all mistakes and have not added any new ones. In the original paragraphs, read first for substance. Are there main ideas and supporting details? Is the paragraph about one central topic? Then read for grammatical mistakes. Students should have corrected any mistakes.