Well, it’s been almost a year, but I FINALLY updated the site. Lots of new anchor charts and reader’s notebook entries, a brand new Book of the Month page, and a ton of new scripted minilessons. Click here!
Enjoy!
XO,
JB
Tag Archives: reader’s notebook
Mini-Update
Posted onTechnically, my summer has been over for two weeks now, but I’m still in a bit of denial. We have a JumpStart Summer School program at my school, and I absolutely love it. It started a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a great way for the invited kids (and us teachers) to get back in the swing of things! The teachers are all bravely fighting the battle of the “summer slide”, and I know we’ll have great results.
I also taught six workshops in the last two weeks (whew!) on assesing readers with a notebook. I taught sessions for teachers of Kindergarten through 5th grade. On my campus, we are going to try notebooks at every grade level this year, so I was excited to begin processing this work with some teachers from around my district. I added just a few charts from those workshops – you can check them out here. (My apologies for the quality of the poorly-lit iPhone pictures.)
I found several scripted minilessons that I’d forgotten about on my iPad, so I will add those soon.
Hope you are having a fabulous summer! I’m headed back to New York City tomorrow for a training with Scholastic – stay tuned for more info on that! 🙂
Julie
Mail Call
Posted onI have been getting lots of emails from fellow educators who’ve stumbled across my site. I love getting these, and I try to answer them as soon as I can. It’s common for me to get several e-mails with the same question, so it occurred to me that there may be more people with the same wonderings who just haven’t clicked the email button. So, here are a few questions I’ve received, followed by my responses.
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I love your readers notebook. I really want to try using them next year. Can you help me explain how they organize it? Do they skip pages to make the different parts? I really love love love it!!! Do you tab it?
–“Teacher”
I use a four-section reader’s notebook, and I do have the kids count the pages and tab it before we ever start using it. The sections are as follows (page numbers are based on a 100-page composition notebook):
- My Reading Life (~15 pages): Identity-building work is done here. (reading timelines, home-run books, identity ladders, last ten books I’ve read, etc.)
- What I’m Learning (~20 pages): Notes or copies of key anchor charts (as they are retired from the wall) go here.
- Read-Aloud (~30 pages): Post-its or writing long based on read-aloud with accountable talk go here. This work is guided heavily.
- Independent Reading (~35 pages): This section looks much like the read-aloud section, but it is not so guided, as the work is done during independent reading.
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I am curious how you would suggest organizing books for students in class. I am a 3rd grade teacher and I have lots of picture books and chapter books in my classroom library. Right now I have them separated (picture, chapter, non-fiction) in book buckets. However, as I get more titles, the book buckets are filling up and I’m running out of space. I just wondered if you had any other suggestions for organizing. Thanks for your input.
— Karen
This is a great question, and one I get often! I had my books in tubs, divided in a number of different ways. I had some bins by genre (poetry, biographies, historical fiction, space science, etc.) and some bins by level to help students who really struggled with choosing just-right books. (Note: almost all of my books were leveled, but they weren’t all sorted by level.) I also had bins for read-alouds and mentor texts. These were empty when the year began, and we filled them throughout the year, as I read a book aloud or we used it as a mentor in writing. Finally, I let my kids have some ownership over organization – this will change your life in terms of keeping the library organized – so I started every year with several empty, unlabeled bins as well. As we launched reader’s workshop, we talked a lot about how readers choose books. These discussions revealed some general preferences in my class, and by the end of that first unit, we had newly labeled buckets for ease of finding those preferred books. Some of these bins earned labels like “If you like Mo Willems, you’ll love these books!” or “Books about Best Friends” or even “Books with Bullies”. I will try to dig up my book bin labels and post them as a printable soon!
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Hey, Julie! Thank you so much for sharing your charts. I love them! I just discovered your site on Pinterest. I have a question…how do you store your charts? I’m sure it’s very clever and would love to know!
Thanks so much for all you do!
Becky
I use the same storage bags that we use to store big books, and I made (well, I asked my very handy father to make) a small hanging rod for them that I mounted to the wall. I sort them by unit and label the bags accordingly.
Now that I’m using charts as models for other teachers, this preserves them better. It’s also less time-consuming than the mount-to-a-coat-hanger method I used to use, although that method was definitely better for the time since my kids needed easy access to them.
Below is a picture of my stored charts. Hope this helps! 🙂
I absolutely love reading your emails! Keep them coming! 🙂
Happy Easter weekend!
Julie
Sweet, Sweet Spring Break
Posted onI didn’t update this weekend because I was busy enjoying some glorious moments of nothing-ness. I’m trying my best to continue that streak for the entirety of my spring break, so it will probably be next week before I update the site. In the meantime, I’ll be adding to my reader’s notebook!
The notebook is about pushing our thinking as readers, and I’m always thinking about new ways to do that. My latest entry is about my thinking across several texts. When I looked at my reading log (yes – I keep a reading log), I noticed a trend, so I wrote about it. It’s rare that I talk about just one book at a time. As a real-world reader, I’m constantly making connections to other books when I share titles with my friends. This entry was a way to capture that thinking.
If you’re also on spring break, enjoy your time off! Even if you’re not on vacation this week, I hope you’re filling it with whatever makes you happiest.
Enjoy! 🙂
Julie