The Highlighting Strategy

Modeling the Highlighting Strategy

All you need to get started are a handful of different colored highlighters, a sample sentence or paragraph you have written yourself, and a space to sit with your students. Have your students watch you use one highlighter to mark your writing with a yellow marker for punctuation green for word usage, red for capitalization and so on.. Explain to your students what you are doing and read the sentences aloud as you mark them. Discuss with your students what you see. For example, you may find that you need to add to capitalize a proper noun, add an ending mark at the end of a sentence or use a dictionary to spell a word correctly. Discuss with your students that by marking your paper you can see how you may like to revise or reorganize it. In short, you can see what belongs with what and where things go.

Scaffolding the Highlighting Strategy  

Now, it is your students' turns. Ask each student to select a recent school writing assignment to revise. Your student should follow the same process that you modeled by using one highlighter to identify the edits, and a different-colored highlighter to mark each. Remember to be consistent  with the color scheme for each convention.  Now use a think, pair, share strategy with your students. Have them partner with a peer for editing and go over each other's edits. Then ask your student to revise the paper based on what he or she has discovered from using the different colored highlighters. When your students are asked to revise the sentence or paragraph, ask them to show you where conventions were added and how sentences were rearranged. Praise your students for all this effort!