Are CHIPS on the menu in your class?
I thoroughly recommend having CHIPS in class as a way of encouraging self-checking and self-marking.
Sounds fishy but don’t worry, this isn’t a reward!
CHIPS is a brilliant idea I came across recently in Torsten Payne’s book Stretch and Challenge for All.
Torsten encourages us to get children checking for CHIPS before sitting back and saying “job done” and just handing a piece of work in.
If they check their work for CHIPS then it’s likely to be much better in the following ways:
- Capital letters – have I used them at the beginning of sentences and names? Are my capital letters bigger than my lower case letters?
- Handwriting – can I read my writing? Are my letters joined? Is my handwriting neat?
- Interesting words – have I used wow words? Have I used adventurous vocabulary? Have I used the correct terminology?
- Punctuation – is it all present and correct?
- Spelling – are there any words that need re-checking?
The CHIPS idea is a simple and effective one to use as it gives children a memorable word to hang onto and use it as a structure for going back over their writing.
Using CHIPS won’t necessarily help locate all the errors but it will certainly find some!
CHIPS is a practical and useful way to help children check as they write and not just something they do at the end of piece of work either.
CHIPS is a self-checking and self-marking idea that is well worth sharing with your class so they can assess each other’s work too. This saves us time having to mark everything!
Although it is intended for ‘literacy’ work it has obvious use across the curriculum when writing in other contexts.