I love read alouds, modeling ways to write about reading, and having conversations with students about books. I am an avid reader of children’s books and thrive on spreading the love of reading in our fifth-grade classroom community. Colleagues sometimes wonder how I get my students to enjoy writing in their notebooks, because they say their students moan and groan when it is time to take out their notebooks to write. Some also share that their students don’t produce high-quality work in their notebooks and usually only retell their books without the critical thinking we want our kids to do as they read.
My secret is that I love to write about my reading and get pumped up when I share strategies with students for creating various charts, color-coding their thinking, using thinking stems, and organizing their ideas. This passion spreads to the students, and I show them how the writing they do in their notebooks can be meaningful to them.
I also make the purpose clear to students of how writing about their reading will help them as readers and writers. Kids are all about the why: Why do I need to write about my reading? Why can’t I just read? They need to be shown that their writing can help them deepen their understanding, strengthen their conversations with partners, help them revise their thinking, and lift the level of their interpretations.
Most important, I give students complete ownership over their notebooks and invite them to use strategies that will help them as readers and to create new strategies they can teach their peers.
For example, students can
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use colored pens (they love using Flair pens!);
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use sticky notes of various shapes and sizes;
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sketch characters and scenes;
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create various charts; and
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color-code their thinking.
Finding Time for Reader’s Notebooks
I set a routine and expectation in my classroom for students to have conversations with their reading partner on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and write about their reading in their notebooks on Tuesday and Thursday for the last 5 to 10 minutes of reading workshop. Designating certain days of the week as “writing days” at the end of reading workshop provides students with a predictable and consistent amount of time to write in their notebooks. This routine helps students balance reading with talking and writing. Of course, students can write in their notebooks any time, but they know they will always have time on Tuesday and Thursday.
I also provide students time to share the strategies they are using in their notebooks on a consistent basis. Students have a bulletin board dedicated to posting colored copies of their notebook pages to share with their peers. Students use sticky notes to mark pages they want copied, I copy them in color, and they hang them up on the bulletin board along with their name and the strategy they used. Students love seeing their work displayed, getting compliments from their classmates, and hearing or seeing that their classmates are going to try out their strategies!
In addition to having students post copied pages from their notebooks onto our bulletin board, I give them time to share specific strategies they are using with their peers by using the document camera and projecting pages onto the classroom Smartboard. As students share and teach their classmates how and why to use the strategy, I create a chart that names the strategy (sometimes students get very creative in naming a strategy they create!) and write their name next to it so their classmates can look at their notebooks and know who to go to if they have questions about the strategy.
Here are some different ways students can use their reader’s notebook as a tool to write about their independent reading and/or read alouds:
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Make a “sticky notes to keep” page: Students go through their independent book after they finish reading it and decide which sticky notes “deserve” to be kept in their reader’s notebook and which ones can be discarded. They title the page “Sticky notes to keep for . . .” and place the sticky notes they are most proud of on the page. Students can either leave the sticky notes “as is” or write long off of one or more sticky notes to say more about their ideas.
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Write “long off of” a sticky note or idea: A sticky note is only a snapshot of their thinking, so the students choose a sticky note or an idea to “write long off of.” They either tape the sticky note or write their idea at the top of a page, and write as much as they can off of the idea by stretching their thinking and using evidence from the text to support their thinking.
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Write long off of an important quote in the text: Students choose a quote they think is important, write the quote, and write long off of it to interpret its meaning.
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Keep track of characters: Students can make character charts in their notebooks so they can keep track of character traits, changes, motivation, or feelings.
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Use “Someone Wants But So” strategy to keep track of the plot: What does the character want? What gets in the character’s way? What does the character do to solve the problem?
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Make T-charts or three-column charts: For example, What I notice/What it makes me think; Theories/Evidence; Cause/Effect; etc.
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Last impression: When students finish reading a book or listening to a read aloud, they write a “last impression,” which is what they are left thinking—the impression the book left on them. This gets the students to reflect on the book and linger with it instead of closing it and quickly beginning a new book. Within the last impression, students can think about what lessons they learned from the text/characters and how the impression connects to the real world.
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Write patches of thinking: Students write a few lines about the author’s message, skip a couple of lines and write a few lines about a symbol, or skip a couple of lines and write a few lines about their revised thinking. This gets the students to write down their thinking using a variety of strategies so you can see snapshots of their thinking on different levels.
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Use boxes and bullets: Students write their theory/idea in a box and then write their pieces of evidence/details in bulleted-list form underneath the box.
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Create a list of burning questions: Students write questions that are not answered in the text yet or they are left wondering at the end of the text. Students can use the thinking stem “Maybe . . .” to infer possible answers to the burning questions.
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Use thinking stems to lift level of thinking and/or revise thinking: “At first I thought . . . , but now I am thinking . . .; This makes me realize . . .; Sometimes in life . . .; I just noticed . . .” This strategy helps students deepen and lift the level of their thinking.
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Create charts with divided sections for characters, burning questions, predictions, new vocabulary, author’s message, characters, or symbols.
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Take notes for book club conversations: This helps students prepare for their conversations by keeping them focused, organized, and engaged. The notes can be in the form of charts, bulleted lists, paragraphs, and visuals.
Students love being creative in their reader’s notebooks and produce high-quality work when given the opportunity to discover, create, experiment, and use various strategies to help them better understand their books and characters. Students also love teaching their classmates (and teacher!) different strategies to write about their reading. I hope you enjoy watching your students use their reader’s notebooks as a tool to help them grow as readers and writers this fall and all year long.
