Tips for Teaching Children to Correct Their Own Writing

When it comes to teaching your child how to write, part of that process is also teaching them how to correct their own writing. For some children this is really the most fun. If you are homeschooling more than one child it may help to get the other children involved as well. If they are old enough you can have them switch papers, and correct each others papers. It will help if you give them a copy of a sample correction page to use as a guide. You can find these types of pages in workbooks or online. To help children to understand what corrections need to be made you can have them complete a few worksheets first. Some of those free worksheets can be found at SuperTeachersWorksheets.com.

If you do not have any other children in your home who are close enough in age, you can try looking for a coop in your area, who would like to form a writing class. This class will help your children to learn to correct their own work, by looking at the papers of other children their age. Another suggestion is to writ your own paper, intentionally leaving some mistakes on the paper for your child to find. Many kids find it to be a lot of fun to look for errors that their parents may have made when writing. While they are checking your paper, you can then start to check their paper. Try doing this once a week for several weeks. If there is something that they missed you can show them what was missed. Remember that the main idea is for the children to learn to spot their own errors in their writing, and then people to write it over the correct way.

Another suggestion is to have the children work on one skill at a time. For example one week you can have they look for all the missing commas. The next week you can have them look for all the missing question marks and periods. Start with punctuation first, and then move on to spelling errors. If you want them to look for everything at once you may find that it is a bit overwhelming for the student. You should also not expect your child to master everything at once. It will take them plenty of time to master certain skills. One thing I have learned is not to expect perfection from their writing. As long as they are able to communicate the basics they will be just fine.