Our Writer's Notebooks

In fifth grade, students are using writer's notebooks to build their skills in writing. These are spiral notebooks that they write thoughts, opinions, feelings, and experiences in. The notebooks are intended to be a source of ideas they can use for future published pieces of writing. Notebook entries are a way to build writing fluency- learning to think and write at the same time. Writing on demand and elaborating on a topic are also important skills that we will develop this year through our notebooks.

We have learned two strategies for finding topics for notebook entries. Pick a Noun is when students choose any person, place or thing, then jot it at the top of their page for a topic. First they write everything they know about that topic. Then they think about opinions and experiences they have with that thing. Our goal is to fill a whole page with writing!

The other strategy we learned is Reading Reflection. That starts with a connection students make while reading. While reading, anything that makes them think, "Hey that reminds me..." can turn into a great notebook entry. Our class has made connections in our reading and written about themes like: annoying younger siblings, racism, poker face, lost homework, and substitute teachers.

Our writer's notebooks do not contain polished revisions and editing. We re-read them, correct the obvious errors and circle any words we're not sure of the spelling. The big revisions will come when we draft our first essays for publishing!

When we have skill work to do, our notebooks come in very handy. Instead of using the English textbooks for example sentences to practice with, we often search through our writers notebooks for example sentences. Last week we filled our whole white board with examples of proper nouns found in our writing!