Getting them to check their work

[TwoProngedFork]

My dear dd in year 2 fails to check her work whenever she writes. She'll skip words or worse still, phrases as she writes slower than she thinks.

I'm trying to encourage her to write one sentence at a time and then check before proceeding to the next but she just wants to write first. Put all her ideas to paper if you will which is great

Doh!

I hit the post button in error.

I'm looking for ways to encourage her to check her work. Attached is a picture of today's effort

Go through it first yourself and decide how many mistakes you would expect her to be able to recognise, and then offer her a reward for finding nearly that number.

Or give her a star for every ‘improvement’ she recognises and another star for being able to correct it properly, and then reward a certain number of stars.

I think it’s a very human bias to read what you think you have written rather than what you have actually written, and is quite a tricky skill for such young children to master. Hence why editing and proof reading are actual adult jobs! Re-reading after every sentence is also not great for the writing flow, how would you like it? Try doing whilst writing on here, you may quickly lose your train of thought.
I find re-reading something a while after writing helps. If you need to edit immediately then it’s best to get her to read it out loud to you. Could you get her to check a while later after doing another activity in between?

@FairyCakeWings - thank you. She likes stars. I'll give that a go for sure.

@EV117 I agree. However, being able to check your work is actually one of the National curriculum targets. She finds checking her work after all that storing overwhelming. That's why I was suggesting she checks as she goes along.

Can you get her to read it aloud? I find that helps me avoid the “reading what I think I wrote” trap

My year 2 daughter is like this too.

We had parents’ evening just before the Easter Break, and her teacher suggested that we encourage her to read her work aloud after she completes it and then edit then.

Once she starts reading her work and realises she's made mistakes, she starts to get despondent.

I'm thinking I need to find a way to make finding mistakes fun

Oh definitely wait till the end. Let her flow and enjoy writing.

Give her a brightly coloured pen and frame it as "making it even better" not as "finding mistakes." Don't forget to praise before she upscales her work, specific praise is useful too - I really like your descriptive word here, I can't remember the name for them can you? That's right, well it was great how you didn't just use a normal one Ike big or small. You don't have to add at that point I wonder if there's anywere else you could squeeze one in? But you could go back to the praise later on.

Have some "super sentence" criteria for her to use so she can feel satisfaction ending up with all those super sentences. Or perhaps focus on different things each time as she gets the hang of it. A highlighter for the spelling detective days for example.

If she commonly leaves bits out going back to "think it, say it, write it." might help even if it does slow her down initially.