Proofreading

Students and Parents,

Our paragraph of the week asks parents to proofread your students work. I have noticed that students are not turning in all of their drafts. I'm unsure as to whether they are just not turning them in or they are not doing them. I've also noticed parents rewriting their child's draft. Please don't make more work for yourselves. This should be no more than a 5-10 minute job for parents. Please do not proof your child's work until you have seen what they can do themselves.

Students, You should be checking for capitals and punctuation. You should first be reading your draft aloud to: check for missing words, missing word endings, misspellings, and grammatical errors (tenses!!!). Then rewrite your first draft correcting the errors you found. Give your parents a clean draft to edit.

Parents, only after your child has done these things, and given you a clean draft, should you quickly (in colored ink -if you have it) edit their draft only for capitals, spelling, and puncutation. Do not edit for grammatica errors or word ommissions at this point. If you see a lot of these errors encourage your child to reread and add the words they are missing, in their final draft. Then sign it.

If students stay on topic and follow the rules given in class as well as written on the assignment, and turn in each part on time, they are given full credit. The errors that they make are needed for me to help guide instruction.

Thank-you for all that you do to help your students succeed.