Rough Drafts

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Rough Drafts
By Michelle

I got this idea from my supervising teacher when I student taught 11 years ago, and I still love it! Use "yellow messy paper" for everything but the final copy. Get some yellow legal tablets. Talk to your children about
the writing process (use all those wonderful ideas in the previous posts!) and model. Use the yellow paper as you model and then recopy on white paper for your final draft. She told me that it made the kids feel more comfortable to know that mistakes were perfectly ok on the yellow messy paper. They understood that this was a work-in-progress and it relieved the stress. It has never

failed to work! It really frees the kids up to focus on content in their first draft. Have them write on every other line. That way, they can use a fine tip marker to go through and make changes on the line below. BTW, this was a third grade class, and when I started student teaching in January, over 1/2 of them were finishing writing their first chapter books!