What's Black and White and Red All Over???

Our drafts, that's what!!!  As we prepare to publish our final drafts next week, we are busily making edits in red pen.  Day by day, we have worked to create a C.U.P.S. Checklist in our journals.  C.U.P.S. is an acronym, which helps us edit for (C.) capital letters, (U.) understanding/Does our story make sense, (P) punctuation, and (S) spelling.  Check out the example of our checklist pictured here.  We learned to go over our work on our own, checking off each item on the list, one at a time.  Then we had the opportunity to E.E.K.K. with a partner to make further changes; partners signed off on each item with their initials.

On Monday, we worked to make corrections concerning capital letters and punctuation, since they work as a team to mark the beginning and end of sentences.  Here is a student sample.  You can see how Frank made an effort to insert punctuation after "Mmm!" Of course, following the rules of quotation marks, he made sure to insert the punctuation inside the quotation marks.

On Tuesday, we focused on making sure our stories were understandable.  We checked for a subject and verb in each of our sentences, so that we could be sure that we had a complete sentence.  We also read sentences in isolation to make sure we didn't repeat words and/or leave words out.  Here is a student sample.  You can see how Frank noticed that a word was missing from his sentence about eating Rice Krispy treats, so he added in the missing word.  He also made an attempt to use the actual copyediting symbol, a caret (not the kind you eat), to mark where he needed to insert the word.  These symbols are made available to students on a copyediting chart in our E.E.K.K.ing area.

Thursday and Friday will be spent taking a closer look at our spelling.  We will check over our spelling and "No Excuse" words.  Some of us took risks (Yay!) in our writing and sprinkled in some sparkling vocabulary words, which we will correct using our new dictionary skills.

How is your draft coming along?  Will you be ready to turn your draft in on Wednesday?  Have you made corrections based on the feedback from Mrs. Z?  Have you looked at the rubric lately?