Friday, March 20, 2009

Why having an editor is a good idea:

At the moment, I'm helping a classroom of 6th grade students create Powerpoint presentations on ancient Africa. They're finishing up the design phase now, creating paper mock-ups of what their finished presentations will look like, including text and picture orientation. The process has awakened them to the importance of teamwork and staying on task, and in some cases, emotions are running high.

I've been checking the mock-ups as the groups finish them, and came across the following sentence fragment on one of the papers: they raped there mommies... It was a test of willpower to soberly suggest to the girl who had written it that she might want to check her spelling. She had no idea what she'd written, having intended to write: they wrapped their mummies...

Yep. Proper spelling is important. That's why we teach it.

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