Notebooks

I have long been an advocate of Writer's Notebooks.  During every year I taught middle school, students wrote weekly in their Writer's Notebooks.  I paralleled the Notebook to independent reading, where students chose books they loved, soaked in stories, and grew their fluency.  The Notebook was a place for student choice and free writing.  Students explored ideas, chose the topics and played with language, form and content.  Their minds could wander or stay on one topic.  The impact of the notebooks was huge.  My students grew in confidence, pens safely traveling across white, blank pages because the pressure of perfect and correct were gone.  They always had ideas for writing because the Notebooks were full of their own thinking on topics they cared about.  Students were so proud to skim their Notebooks at the end of the year, marveling at the volume they had produced.

When I came to high school, I abandoned the Notebooks for a while.  I thought they might be too young (silly me!), and I thought I didn't have time for them.  Second semester I brought them back.  Students again wrote freely, but without the beginning of the year introduction, the notebooks didn't have quite the same momentum and power.

Last year, I abandoned notebooks altogether. After all, I was only teaching reading, and I thought I should focus on just that.  Writing was set aside except for responding to texts.  Gone were the leisurely pages, the surprise thoughts, the dreams that emerged from nowhere.  I felt the void, but the kids didn't.  They did not expect to write in reading class.

In that Notebook-less year, my own thinking and learning have demanded that I rethink using a Writer's Notebook again. I attended a session with Aimee Buckner at the Write To Learn Conference in February and was flooded with ideas and a desire to have my students writing again.  My class is not just reading class.  It's LITERACY Seminar, a course designed to improve the reading, the understanding, and the thinking of my students.  Reading improves students' writing, for sure.  But writing also improves their reading.  These two belong together. They've missed each other this past year.

The Notebook must return.

The question then is how to use it.  Here's what I think right now:
Our Notebook (what to call it?) will have two sections:
1)  Reading
2)  Writing

The reading section will be for responses to texts students are reading - letters to me, thoughts jotted to track thinking across a text, deeper reflections upon finishing a text.  This writing will help students understand their reading better, and it will help them understand what authors do in their writing to impact readers.  Finally, they will gain deeper meaning from their reading by regularly reflecting on it.  Having a notebook where students consistently respond to texts will also allow them to look at their thinking across time and reflect on their own growth.

The writing section will be a place to emulate authors -  trying out genres, styles, wording - and a place to write on topics and in genres the students want to try out.  Students will do lots of free writing in this section - some of my choosing, some of the students' choosing.  The purpose of this section will be to deepen students' understanding of author's craft  and to strengthen the tools they have in crafting their own writing. Ultimately, this section gives students more power to express themselves - to clarify and extend their own thinking.  And because it is kept in a notebook, we can easily see growth across time.

I'm breathing easier already knowing Notebooks will be back full-force this year.