Strategies for Teaching the 6 Traits

Contributor

Strategy

Roberta Gray,
Sherri Hurst,
Jackie Meehan

• Hand out a paper with several sentences with mistakes.
• Tell the children they are going to be the "teacher" today. Explain to them that this paper has many mistakes on it and they need to find the mistakes and correct them.
• You may also tell them how many mistakes are on the paper. Have them circle and correct any mistakes they find.
• Follow this with a class discussion of what they circled, why they circled it, and how they corrected it.
  

Barbara Martin

This poem might be fun to post in the room and remind students of some of the usage rules.

Is he went?
Was he gone?
Has he left I all alone?
Us can never go to he;
Him must always came to we.
It can never was!

Ms Shelow

This was e-mailed to me today and it gives me ideas of how to teach the conventions. Leave out all punctuation and see how children would put punctuation in. Model how different punctuation causes different meanings without changing word order.

An English professor wrote the words, "a woman without her man is nothing" on the blackboard and directed the students to punctuate it correctly.

The men wrote: "A woman, without her man, is nothing."

The women wrote: "A woman: without her, man is nothing."