Irvington Students Collaborate To Enhance Each Other’s Writing

IRVINGTON, NY — Seventh-graders — who had been writing personal narrative stories in Tom Sandler’s and Caroline Knudsen’s English language arts classes in Irvington Middle School — recently collaborated with their peers to polish their writing. Working with partners, the students read each other’s essays before providing constructive feedback and sharing ideas and advice about how to improve each other’s writing.

During the exercise, the seventh-graders practiced both revision and editing strategies to help one another’s true story come to life on the page.

“After a series of mini-lessons with emphasis on strategies such as pacing, inner and outer voice, figurative language, dialogue and identifying simple, compound and run-on sentences, the students put their skills to good use by utilizing an editing checklist to further push the thinking and writing skills of their peers,” Sandler said.

In addition to improving each other’s writing skills, the learning experience encouraged the students to be critical, but respectful, kind and open-minded in the process.

“We look forward to reading the final published writing pieces and are proud of the work that has been done,” Knudsen said.

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Photo caption: Irvington Middle School seventh-graders recently collaborated with their peers to polish their writing. Photo credit: Irvington Union Free School District.