Reader's Notebooks Volume 2.0 (+Writer's Notebooks)

I originally posted about my Reader's Notebooks last year. This post is an adaptation of that original post. You can view the original here. 

This year I will be teaching Grade 3 and am once again overhauling my entire language program...really? Why do I do this??

I want to use both Reader's Notebooks and Writer's Notebooks in my class this year and am still working out a lot of the details. So this post may be a whole lot of "talking out loud" in order to figure it out. As I have posted about before I will be using the Daily 5 model- although calling it Literacy Workshop, and integrating it with my reading and learning about The Power of Retelling model.

I have always liked Beth Newingham's organizational structure for her Reader's Notebooks. However, I found that my students and I were not able to keep up with it last year. That being said, the teacher whose room I am moving into also loved Beth Newingham's ideas and left an entire class set of binders for me to use....what to do, what to do??

I am going to adopt/modify her idea and use the binders as Literacy Portfolio! This way, the name stays similar with our daily program, the binders will get used and I will have an organizational structure in place that works for me. 

Click the image to download your own copy.

I am hoping to create the section dividers with my students this year as part of our reading/ writing lessons. I think using card stock and perhaps 3M post-it tabs will do the trick?? 

The sections in their Literacy Portfolio will be:

1. Reading Progress

2. Writing Progress

And that's it!!

I am hoping that these binders will actually be something where we can track their development over the course of the year so that at the end of Grade 3 they can see how far they have come. The binders will be something we look at once a month in order to reflect and share our progress.

But what about all the other stuff you had in their Reader's Notebooks last year? 

Great question!

I have decided that a Reading Journal and a Writing Folder will work better for me...or so I think since I haven't actually done it yet. But, here's to thinking positively.

Click the image to download your own copy.

I am unable to to offer this as a freebie due to the images I chose to use! 

Sorry, I do not have a licence to share them.

How Will It All Come Together?

Last year I had my students filling out a reading log as they finished each book they read and we tracked it using the Genre Tally sheets I learned about from reading The Book Whisperer. I am not sure that will go very well with Grade 3's...at least not in the beginning of the year. So instead I am going to have them track the books they have finished reading as part of their weekly homework.

Here's what I plan to do this year-

Reading Log- This will be handed out and collected every Monday.

The curved frame used in my Reading Log is from- LB Designs

 http://www.teachersnotebook.com/shop/LBDesigns 

I want to track my student's books by genre but I don't think it's something I want to jump into in the beginning of the year with Grade 3. We will start with just tracking how many minutes we have read and move on from there when the students seem ready. 

Reader Response Work

Last year I planned to have my Grade 4's responding to me about their reading in the same manner I had used with my Grade 7/8's...with some adaptations of course.

This did not work.

I loved it when I did with my big kiddos as it felt like a weekly conversation with my students about books and literature.  My grade 4's really struggled and we just never seemed to get it off the ground. This year I plan to make it more of an in-class task and perhaps more orally based to start. I do think this is where The Power of Retelling will help to fill some gaps in my program!

There are still some things to work out but as all good teaching it will be (and should be!) a work in progress.