We have been teaching revision all along but today we took the writing out of the blog and put it into the notebook to make sure our writers don't loose site of the fact that our primary instruction is writing and our secondary instruction is blogging. We printed out each post and had students cut the text and glue it into their writing notebook for a series of lessons that will shine a spotlight on the hard work of revision.
Our lesson today was on revising leads. We taught a mini lesson on two ways bloggers can revise leads. We decided to teach this lesson after we noticed yesterday that many of our students' blog posts were lacking a lead in introduction that communicates to the reader why they care so much about their topic. In our conferences yesterday we saw two posts that were very persuasive - one about school uniforms and one about toy guns. Both students had clear and strong feelings about their topic. We asked both students the same question - Where does this passion come from? Both students had very specific answers.
The student writing about school uniforms told us that he used to attend Catholic school and has had the experience of wearing a uniform everyday. He feels strongly that uniforms are not a good idea. To revise his lead and communicate his passion, we taught him to lead in with a mini story. By narrating his experience of attending Catholic school and wearing a uniform and then transferring to public school, the reader is better able to understand his point of view.
When we conferred with the student opposed to toy guns, we learned that his passion comes from the idea that fighting of any kind makes him scared and nervous. He likened that fear and feeling to his feelings of toy guns. When he sees even "play fighting" he told us, he gets that same sense of uneasiness that he gets when he sees real fighting of any kind. We taught him to lead in with that feeling and opinion. By leading with his feelings on fighting of any kind, the reader will be better able to appreciate his point of view on toy guns.
In today's mini lesson we used both those examples from our conferences yesterday to teach revising leads to the whole class. We shared with them how the two students yesterday revised leads. We invited all our students to use their writing notebooks today to try revising their leads using either a mini story or a feeling/opinion as a lead.
Here are two examples of how students revised today:
1. This student was working on a post about decisions. Here is a screen shot of the original post:
2. This student was working on a post about loosing things. She decided to revise her lead by adding her strong feelings about loosing thing.
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