Making the Writing Process Explicit

We've recently written about caring explicitly. Now it's the turn of making the children's writing process more obvious to both child and teacher (oh, and anyone who might visit your classroom and want to see books).

In our school, children write in black ink and adults mark in blue ink. Both different colours and obvious to see who's written what. The children do any editing / tweaking in green ink. Our most recent addition is responding to feedback in red pen. 

The reason for using red for responding was initially as a result of being told children weren't responding to feedback in books. The children were responding. It just wasn't easy to find.

Image credit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bic_Cristal

So now we have this: Children write in black ink. They edit using green ink. Next, an adult will mark in blue and the child will complete the process by responding to / acting upon the feedback in red ink.

Although this was originally put in place to meet the needs of someone else looking at the books, it has proven very useful. The children can see from piece of work to piece of work what they're adding to their writing at different stages and the progress (hopefully) that they are making.