Editing with Color and the Water Cycle

I love everything about teaching writing to my students! I especially love to see their growth as the year goes on. This past month, I have felt like many of my kiddos are ready to be pushed further when it comes to revising and editing their papers. Although we edit and revise regularly, some of the still don't take the time to actually look for their mistakes or look for places they can add details. To help motivate them to edit, I introduced editing with crayons and colored pencils. BOY, were they on the hunt! They searched and searched their papers for mistakes just so they could write with crayon on it. Haha! They used a different color for each of these 5 things we were looking for. This way, I could really tell their corrections were purposeful.

For our last paper of the year, I plan on doing this same type of thing with revising, specifically with adding details and improving word choice.

My kiddos and I also studied the water cycle this week. I was running short on time and didn't create an activity for this this. I also didn't find any activities out there in blogging land in time. Soooooo, other than drawing the water cycle and talking about it, I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

UNTIL, I remembered BrainPop. Have you heard of it before?! I'm sure you have! It has educational videos for kids and it even has a BrainPop Jr. dedicated to K-3. I haven't been on in years, so I signed up for the free trial. Not only do they have videos, but there are vocabulary words and definitions, and quizzes (which you can print or do online). My students loved it and it was perfect to follow up my mini-lesson about the water cycle. And the kids got 100% on the quiz (we did it together). No, I'm not being paid to promote their site or anything (though that would be nice. Haha!). I just really liked it!