Patrol Your Writing

When I jumped from fifth grade to high school, I was horrified to see what kids considered "good enough to hand in to my teacher" assignments. I pretty much thought ninth graders would be experts at using spell-check and correcting typos BEFORE handing things in digitally. I was wrong. 

I had to resort back to my elementary ways with cute images and catchy phrases. Reminding students to patrol their writing with this little image, helped a lot...

I also created a little sign to post by student's home computers. You can use this in the classroom as well. Click here for a printable version.

No, I did not come up with this handy little acronym. It was created by Mulcahy, Marfo, and Peat and can be found in a report called SPELT: A strategies program for effective learning and thinking.  The original "O" stands for "Overall" but with writing, it's important to organize your thoughts as well. 

More infornation on the COPS Editing Strategy can be found here.

It's catchy and works with elementary kids and high schoolers, so I thought I should share! 

Now let me just spell-check this post one more time before publishing...