Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Jeff Anderson's book offers lots of practical ideas for tweaking your writer's workshop and making your students better writers. He devotes chapters to various skills and how to teach them (serial commas, appositives, participles, etc.). One of his basic tenets is selecting good examples of sentences from your own readings of YA books, then using them as teaching tools by asking kids what they notice (it might be how appositives are punctuated, or how the colon introduces a list). The sentences interest the kids because they are taken from high interest books, and instead of learning from BAD sentences that are riddled with mistakes for correction, students learn from models that are free of mistakes (novel thought -- "mentor" sentences instead of "mental" ones).
You can find plenty of sentences to use in your own readings, but if you don't have time, Anderson provides examples for you in this book. He also devises sentence combining activities by "deconstructing" good mentor sentences and asking students to put them together again (where's Humpty Dumpty when you need him?). Again, great idea. Studies have proven that sentence combining is an effective teaching tool.
I just used Anderson's idea for creating an Appositive Book with separate flaps for the subject, the appositive, and the verb parts of the sentences and my students loved it. By raising different flaps in the partitioned book, they were able to create some amusing (OK, silly) sentences using appositives. It's stuff like this that makes stuff like grammar (the Teflon of our teaching chores) stick!
Recommendation: Buy. Then use. Frequently.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Everyday Editing
Editing is often seen as one item on a list of steps in the writing process—usually put somewhere near the end, and often completely crowded out of writer's workshop.Too many times daily editing lessons happen in a vacuum, with no relationship to what students are writing.
In Everyday Editing, Jeff Anderson asks teachers to reflect on what sort of message this approach sends to students.Does it tell them that editing and revision are meaningful parts of the writing process, or just a hunt for errors with a 50/50 chance of getting it right—comma or no comma?
Instead of rehearsing errors and drilling students on what's wrong with a sentence, Jeffinvites students to look carefully at their writing along with mentor texts, and to think about how punctuation, grammar, and style can be best used to hone and communicate meaning.
Written in Jeff's characteristically witty style, this refreshing and practical guide offers an overview of his approach to editing within the writing workshop as well as ten detailed sets of lessons covering everything from apostrophes to serial commas. These lessons can be used throughout the year to replace Daily Oral Language or error-based editing strategies with a more effective method for improving student writing.
