Since we only have one laptop, the girls needed to take it in turns. F went first with M watching, as I talked her through what she needed to do. When she was done, we discussed together what they thought the steps were for editing something and I wrote these on the whiteboard:
1) Read your work.
2) Fix any mistakes.
3) Change words which are the same.
4) Make it sound better!
5) Add more detail.
Then M had her turn, with me talking her through, but also referring to the steps we'd generated together. F watched for a bit then went to play but in the same room - so she'd keep chiming in to help when she overheard M getting stuck. 😂
These are the before and after results:
For point 2, fixing mistakes, they found spelling errors and use of the wrong tense (I didn't realise they didn't know the meanings of past/present/future! So we discussed this... Though I decided to omit the word "tense" for simplicity's sake). For point 3, they tried to get rid of too many "and"s as well as repetitive nouns or adjectives. For point 4, this was changing boring words (e.g. where M changed "buzzing" to "noisy", although personally I prefer the former!) and rewriting sentences (e.g. F shortened her original to "I could smell stinky mud"). For point 5, they just added an extra adjective here and there.
A little while later we edited a different short description they had previously typed up, except this time I printed it out for them to practise handwriting instead.
I asked if they remembered the steps for editing their writing, which they did! So once they told me what they were, we went through and did them one by one. For each point, I asked them to choose a different coloured pencil to underline with - so they knew when they were copying that if they came across something underlined, that meant they needed to change or add something! Once we'd been through and underlined everything and I'd written correct spellings on the whiteboard, I left them to it to do.
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