I know I've said I would share the topic of Daily Edit with you. I figured now is as good a time as ever to explain what they are since I just gave a stack to my new student to work through at home.
Our daily edit is actually a group of four pages that the students complete as the first part of their morning work each day. The first two cover proofreading, sentences, parts of speech, analogies, and vocabulary. There is always a short passage the students are required to read through and correct for errors. (This passage we do together until the students are able to do it on their own.) The last two cover basic math skills, and logic/problem solving problems where the students are required to draw a diagram or model of some sort in order to figure out the answers to the math problems below. A former teacher used materials from several different books to create a daily edit that supplemented the regular curriculum.
With our reading program, Houghton Mifflin 'Reading,' we come back and visit topics again. The nice thing about our daily edits is that they cover a lot of the skills we are doing in our reading series. When the binder work was put together, the teacher who created them put the skills in the order we would come across them in the curriculum. She even laid it out so that there was some preview of work to come and review of work we did. So already my second graders have been exposed to and reviewed homophones, homonyms (multiple-meaning words), synonyms, antonyms, compound words, punctuation, capitalization, word families, sentence structure, analogies, nouns, verbs, adjectives, genre, proofreading, and singular and plural nouns.
I have chosen to give my new student the daily edits she has missed as sort of a foundation for the writing, grammar, and math skills she has missed. We are beginning a new unit in Language Arts on Tuesday. During this unit, there will be several writing projects, a revisiting of comprehension skills that were learned in first grade as well as some new skills for this year, and vocabulary exercises.
In math, we are still working through different strategies to add (13 in all according to our Everyday Math curriculum), and strategies for subtraction in order to help the children recognize and retain their basic facts. Math is a universal language, and she has been doing well so far. I have decided to pick out the pages in her math book that are related to the skills we are working on now. Since Everyday Math is a spiraling curriculum, she will be exposed to those skills over and over throughout the quarter.
In social studies we finished our first unit, which was on communities, and the second unit is more of a continuation of that idea. I have decided that I am going to take a break from social studies and teach science in its place since, a) our daily schedule does not permit both being taught at the same time (We have one block of time during the day to teach either science or social studies.), and, b) I already did a unit in social studies. So this week we are going to start our Foss science curriculum. That way, when we go back to social studies, the review of communities will be a review for everyone and my new student will benefit from that review. (Besides, trying to teach science one day or week at a time and then social studies the alternating week or day has shown to be too confusing for the students. So now I alternate by unit.)
It's a fine balancing act, trying to get her caught up without overwhelming her and her parents. On one hand, she needs those most vital skills for her foundation. On the other hand, she would be buried under work if I gave her every single assignment she missed for those 25 days.
Bit by bit, I'll get her there.
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