Notebook Know-How
From the first two chapters I really enjoyed reading Notebook Know-How. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn’t read like a traditional text book. The writer speaks with ease about the use of the notebook and its use in the class room. The two beginning chapters gave excellent ways to begin the notebook. I had teachers in high school that focused on journal writing as a form of self expression and expressed to students that all writing was praise worthy. However, The tips for beginning to write in a writer’s notebook that were included in the book give teachers a fool proof way to begin using a writer’s notebook as part of their classroom. As I understood it, there are many purposes to the writer’s notebook. The main goal is to increase writing fluency and give students practice with writing.
As a future teacher of writing I hope to motivate my students to want to nurture their writing abilities. I am a strong advocate for writing as a form of self expression and as a way of working out problems that seem to occur in our lives. The strategies for writing that the author discusses in the first two chapters gave the students a way to get in the habit of frequent writing.
My first step in launching the notebook was to give it a little personality. This gave me a multitude of ideas of what to write about and will give me some inspiration when I hit a dry spell. The steps in Notebook Know-How made the notebook seem much less daunting.
I don’t think the organization is important as long as it is meaningful to the student. It has been my experience that when organization is forced upon me it becomes a chore and students may become reluctant to write freely when there is a structure enforced upon their notebook.
HOT Blogging
I found this article very informative. The author’s explanations of how this was used in her class gave me many new ideas of how I would use it in my own classes. The idea of blogging is an easy way to give students more ownership over the writing they are doing. By seeing their published works on the internet students will take pride in what they are writing about. The author pointed out several different types of blogs that one would find in an educational setting. If time was allotted to using the blogs during school hours this would be a great tool to encourage students to write about what they are reading and build upon what their peers are writing.
In a low income school, students may not have internet or computer access at home and would be at a severe disadvantage if blog posting was assigned as homework. However, for these students it is the most important to make meaningful connections with the literature they are reading and their lives and school and at home.
