READ Worksheets

I once had a fellow teacher tell me she had googled READ Worksheets to find out what exactly they are! That's where the idea came for me to blog about this concept. I came up with the word to label a product I had created on TpT. Maybe now if you google it, it brought you here. But I doubt it. I'm not that well known! Jajajajajaja (that's my inner Latina).

For a long time now I've been obsessed with the word READ. I have created bookmarks and written out Read Each And every Day. I *think* that works. When my kids ask me for their screen turn, my response is typically, "Have you read yet?" I am always going to the library trying to find new series. I am obsessed with the little libraries all around my town. And I go a bit crazy at the school's book fairs and donated books to our librarian and my children's classrooms.

My other obsession is grammar. Of course it is. Who else puts the word into their store name? My kids call me a Grammar Nerd. They tell other people I'm a Grammar Nerd. Truthfully, I'm pretty proud of myself for being a Grammar Nerd. If I don't know the answer, I will look it up. But change are I do know the answer because yes, I'm that nerdy about grammar.

So when I saw One Stop Teacher Shop's product on grammar, I bought it. Not for myself. I'm not in the classroom. But I bought it and shared it with my son's teacher. And then I was inspired to create something of my own. And then I labeled it a READ worksheet. I love the idea of offering choices to students for homework. I love rigorous work that challenges students to go above and beyond. And more than anything else I love when grammar is authentic and connects students to a story. So here it is . . . . TA - DA . . . . the READ worksheet for the story Charlotte's Web.

Directions: The student finds and corrects the one mistake in each sentence. The can complete one box in each row, or go above and beyond and attempt the other boxes. They can outline the box in color of errors they are certain about.

This particular worksheet can be assigned after your class has read Chapters 1-2. These worksheets aren't meant to overwhelm your students. They are designed to give your students confidence in what they know, and they target 2nd and 3rd grade learners. Rigor with choice. They offer practice with concepts that are typically challenging for ELLs. After all, that's how I became a Grammar Nerd. I taught ESL for many years and as I sat in a Language Acquisition course at Georgetown after spending four years studied Spanish, I had the urge to return to my college advisor who said to me, "Why are you studying Spanish if you are only interested in the grammar and not the literature?" and scream, "Because I love grammar! I love analyzing why and how a *mistake* happens when someone is learning a language. There is a term for this . . . error analysis. So darn fancy.

I have set up the worksheet so that your student is practicing the same skill they would if they were doing peer editing. They have to use proofreading marks to correct the errors. I don't want to make them rewrite the sentence. That's torture (my eldest made me use the word torture because the act of physically writing feels like torture to him).

If you are using this as a homework assignment, you can go around the room and stamp the papers of the students who made a solid attempt. Then have your students work in pairs to complete the worksheet. Let them learn from their classmates who might understand why you need the article an instead of a before the noun (an ax). Let another classmate show them how to use proofreading to connect two words that form a compound word: outside and backyard.

I promise you teachers in higher grades will come back to thank you the first time they try peer editing in their classrooms with their students' original writing!