Anchor Charts for Conventions

Last year, I worked with one of the teachers in our district on how to teach conventions to students so that they would not only retain the skills, but also use the skills in their writing. Together, we created a chart during an inquiry lesson that specified all of the conventions that her fourth graders knew. That chart held her students accountable for those skills whenever they wrote, and the skills on that chart were aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

Because her students did so well on both our district's editing and revising assessments as well as the conventions component of our district's analytic rubric, I have created a set of master charts for grades 1-5 that I am sharing. These charts align to grade level standards and increase in expectations going up the grades. Since these charts are cumulative, you wouldn't want to be a fifth-grade teacher if students haven't mastered the previous grade level standards!

My hope is that these charts serve as anchor charts for conventions within classrooms. They can be introduced during writing workshop with the important teaching point that writers pay attention and use conventions in order to make sure that readers can understand their writing.  I also am creating smaller versions that can serve as toolkits for students to keep in writing folders or within notebooks. Depending on how teachers roll out the lesson, perhaps students' initials may appear on the charts in order to increase accountability and designate "classroom experts."

So one of the CCSS language standards is addressed within out curriculum. Now, on to parts of speech and grammar... If anyone out there has done work around integrating some of the grammar standards into workshop practices and writing units, I would love to hear about it. 

Happy writing (and punctuating!),