Revising My Role

Today was a day to celebrate. We talked about revision and made a chart. I'll take a pic tomorrow. I settled on three examples of revision I had witnessed students trying here and there, things we had already had in a mini-lesson. Today was the day to put it into words for them. We talked about crossing out and continuing on with our writing. We talked about adding a word to make a sentence more detailed. This one went two ways, add a word to the middle of  a sentence or to the end of a sentence. We seemed ready and kids went off to write. I noticed several kids crossing out, this was encouraging. This also meant kids were rereading independently! Yay! It's nice when a plan works. When we shared at the end of workshop almost half the class had an example of a way they revised their work. Some crossed out parts of a picture. Some had added an important word that they had forgotten. A few had crossed out words or parts of a sentence. I was impressed. Then I shared my poem from yesterday and told them how I did some of the same things when I revised. They could see where I crossed out words and added or changed the arrangement of my lines.
Why didn't I start with this? I almost did. But today I wanted to be a writer just like them. I wanted to share my work at the "sharing circle" instead of being the teacher. Today, we were all the same.