Notebook Work
I start the school year with an immersion in notebook writing. I ask students to complete a five-page autobiography in words, pictures, and/or drawings to gather thinking and ideas for possible writing topics.
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A central goal in leading writers is to help them understand the power of point of view. In this case I took a photograph similar to one from my 5-page autobiography and changed the point of view to third person. This unleashed a freedom in my writing that I hadn’t found before.
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To commemorate this day I gave students three poems to write from. Many glued them into their notebooks as I did.
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I have included the goals for this work from my white board in my classroom one fall. I learned about the importance of sketching and writing from my friend Linda Rief.
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The Sarah Kay poem “Hands" (in Spoken Word Poetry videos) has often led me to experiments with the idea of writing about moments that involve touch.
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We studied music lyrics as poetry and moments in our lives connected to music this month.
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Writing in response to literature is often about working to understand more deeply what a writer is doing in a text by imitating or standing next to part of the text and working out our own thinking about the ideas there.
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I encourage students to find a quotation in a book they are currently reading that is important to them or says something important about living. We add these to the graffiti wall in our classroom—something I learned from my friend, Donalyn Miller. Many also illustrate these quotations for their notebooks.
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The Op-Ed chart from the New York Times in 2010, "Picturing the Past 10 Years,” was not only fascinating to read, but was one of the first infographics I wanted to imitate.
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We write next to poetry almost every day in my classroom. Poetry distills images and word choice and captures big ideas in small spaces, as I tell my students. It is an ideal text to study because we can reread it several times and see more as we do.
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As I detailed in the article on Storyboarding, this brainstorming work helps students focus on scenes or moments in time that can be developed into a story.
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