Does your child struggle to check their work?

When I first qualified as a schoolteacher (many moons ago), I learned quickly that asking children to ‘check and revise’ their writing is insufficient.

We have to show children how to do this.

If we say, ‘Please check your writing’, we should expect 10 seconds later to receive a quick response of, “Finished!”

So, one approach is to break it down into parts.

Here’s how … 👇

Ask your child to look for one feature to revise at a time.

Children can struggle to check vocabulary, punctuation, spelling, and content simultaneously - it requires a large working memory plus a competent understanding of the whole text structure.

So, go through once looking for punctuation. Next, go through for spelling, and so on.

By age group, I’ve jotted the age expectations here so you can gauge how your child is doing with this.

✍️Year 3

• A Year 3 child should be able to read through their writing and suggest improvements.
• Improvements could be spelling, punctuation, grammar or vocabulary. Please note that spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary should be age-appropriate (so, the whole writing composition will not be ‘perfect’ English at this age).
• At this age, children can read their writing out to others using the appropriate intonation and tone.

✍️ Year 4

• A year 4 child is like Year 3 above, but they can also:

1. a) Make the corrections/improvements to their writing (rather than just spotting them and discussing the revisions). This requires re-reading a sentence a few times to ensure that a new modification makes sense as a sentence and in the context of all the other existing sentences and overall coherence.
2. b) Read through other children’s writing and suggest improvements.

✍️ Year 5 / 6

• Children in Years 5 and 6 can read through their work and make any necessary revisions (spelling, vocabulary, punctuation and grammar – up to a Year 6 level/end of KS2 by 11 years old).
• Now that their writing will have cohesion from one paragraph to another, they should check for consistency across paragraphs. So, if they spot a spelling mistake in one paragraph, can they check it’s the same in others? Have they repeated adverbials across paragraphs? If so, choose an alternative. Are they repeating certain adjectives, such as ‘magnificent’? If so, choose a synonym: impressive, sublime, etc.

Happy checking, everyone!

Anna