Civil War Research Paper

Two of the skills that my students work on throughout the school year are writing and research.  They are assigned two project based research projects and two traditional essays.  This trimester the students were asked to choose any topic they wanted to research as long as it related to the American Civil War.  They were required to use a minimum of 4 different sources, including a book and a primary source, and then had to write a research paper, complete with thesis, using MLA formatting.

As illustrated in the screen shot above, my comments (the yellow stickies) when grading the essays are very comprehensive.  This is because each student is given the opportunity to go back and revise their paper based on the feedback they are given.  We meet to discuss their revisions and then they can earn back half the points that they lost on the original essay.  I want to encourage good effort on the first attempt but also want to encourage them to revise their papers so they can learn from their mistakes and become better writers.  I'm sure you can imagine that grading 70 papers with such detail takes a good amount of time and I appreciate the patience of both parents and students as you wait anxiously for the grades!