I have yet to meet a student who proofreads willingly. However, you can teach your child to proofread with less hassle using some simple strategies. Best of all, you can add some fun to the process!
Teach Your Child to Proofread Using Games
One of the best ways to teach your child to proofread is by setting up a treasure hunt for mistakes. Go through the paper yourself and make notes about categories of errors that you wish the student to find. Make note of things like capitalization problems, missing punctuation, spelling, and so forth. Be sure to figure out how many of each type of problem you see. Now send your child on a treasure hunt. Challenge him or her to find the mistakes that you already know are there.
Make the game more challenging by providing only the numbers of types of errors instead of telling the student the categories. For example, challenge him or her to figure out which type of mistake was made three times in the paper, and which one happened six times.
You can also indulge in a role-playing game. Give your child a classic red pen and have him or her correct the paper as the teacher would. Make the focus of the activity finding and correcting mistakes instead of having a “perfect” paper, and then “grade” the student’s work based on how well they played teacher.
Teach Your Child to Proofread with Independent Strategies
As your student matures, he or she will need to take on the responsibility of editing his or her own work without prompting. Instill some of these habits to help teach your child to proofread:
- Always use the grammar checker and spell checker built into most word processing software. There is absolutely no harm in using the tools that have been provided. Just be sure your student realizes that these are far from infallible, and there is no substitute for going over the writing by hand as well.
- Show your student how reading through the paper backwards can disrupt tricks of the eye where we see what we expect to see. By reading from the end to the beginning, your learner will need to concentrate on each word individually, and will catch spelling mistakes and even some punctuation and capitalization errors.
- Create a proofreading and editing checklist with your student. List categories of errors, with a focus on the common types that trouble him or her. Use the checklist to guide proofreading and editing. Go through the paper once for each category, just looking for that type of error.
Do You Have Other Homework Hassles?
You’ll want to watch the free webinar: How to Eliminate Homework Hassles in 30 Minutes a Day. Nearly every parent has troublesome homework issues, but there ARE solutions. You can create peace in your household and eliminate the nightly battle over homework. Watch the webinar and grab your free guidebook that will walk you through a proven process to make homework time go more smoothly at your house.
This poor woman is up to her eyeballs in frustration. How often do you end up looking like this when you need to get your kids going on their homework? There ARE solutions. One important strategy is to build a “homework habit.”