Written Conventions Activity

After reading LOTS of student responses over the last several weeks, Mrs. M. and I decided it was about time we reviewed written conventions. Given the mistakes I had seen, I decided to focus on homonyms, spelling/spell check, commas, apostrophes, subject-verb agreement, and verb tense. I created a document for each topic that would require the kids to line edit writing excerpts that were bad examples of each area of written conventions. To make the activity a little more fun, I let them work in groups and only gave them 5 minutes with each document to find all the mistakes that had been made. Also, I included a humorous example of each convention being used incorrectly (because I thought they were funny). Here are a couple of examples of what I used for this activity:

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Deer Students,

Win your righting something four my class, bee shore that your using the write homophones. Eye cannot tale you enough how sad it makes me win you use the wrong word. Their our know excuses four using the wrong words because you have the education too no better. Your smart enough to no the differences, but if you rush threw you're work, you mite mess up.

Sincerely, Your Favorite Teacher
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Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My checker tolled me sew. 

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The kids did pretty well, although it was very clear what they were struggling with. Before they left, we talked about their struggles and the things they needed clarification on- Looks like I'll need to concoct a mini-lesson on subject/verb agreement and verb tense! I left them with the fact that they are smarter than Microsoft Word. When I typed up these documents, Word hardly caught any mistakes! They were shocked, so that turned out to be a great take-away.

As for me, I am having trouble with my conventions now after having to type up so many bad examples! I was seriously going cross-eyed and I felt mentally exhausted afterwards... But it was totally worth it :)