Everyday Editing

Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop by Jeff Anderson is another gold mine from Stenhouse. Luckily, since I had high hopes for the book I ordered his other one, Mechanically Inclined, before even starting to read Everyday Editing. Now I won't have to wait as long for it to come in the mail, since it ended up exceeding my high expectations.

As with most of the resources that I have been so excited about, it is a perfect fit for my vision of what a literacy block should be like. I chose the book because this year I noticed a trend that a group of my students still lacked command of areas such as sentences and paragraphing, and many changed very little between drafts. While they made improvements throughout the year, it was an area where I wanted to improve as a teacher. The strategies that I had in place were not comprehensive enough to produce the results I desired.

Because of the inclusion of editing in the title and the subsections listed in the chapters I was expecting this book to mainly cover conventions. However, as I started reading I realized that Jeff's concept of focusing on good sentences to teach grammar ends up encompassing so much more. My excitement built as this realization hit me early on in the book. I started to write a note off to the side listing the other areas of our state writing rubric that his ideas would positively impact: voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions... Then I started to laugh realizing that I was basically writing down all the areas on the rubric, and that is how right at page 10 I knew that I had found an invaluable resource. Further reading through the book confirmed this initial feeling for me.

Another aspect that stood out to me was the way Jeff made grammar so much fun. I could tell that his ideas would inspire long-lasting grammar learning and a fascination with language, rather than dread. I already have a lot of ideas in mind on how I am going to implement his ideas in the classroom both on English and Spanish weeks. While the book provided me with many ideas to use in English, I am going to work on developing some in Spanish over the summer. Of course, there are some that he explains in English that can be covered in the same manner in Spanish.

Jeff Anderson's ideas will be a huge piece to my writing workshop puzzle, and I feel so fortunate to have found out about his ideas.