Literacy Notes

Writer's Notebook

Last week the students in Years 1 - 6 bought home their Writer’s Notebook to decorate their front covers in a way that represents them. The Writer’s Notebooks is a feature in all year levels as a tool for students to gather, keep and develop ideas. Teachers use ‘Mentor Texts’ to engage their students and support them to notice the author’s craft related to the focus lesson. Throughout their primary school years, students progressively take more ownership and responsibility for their writing, making decisions about the style of their writing depending on its purpose and the intended audience.

The Writer’s Notebook serves as a means to encourage young writers to value writing, where ‘seeds’ for a longer writing project require revisiting and rereading to locate ‘a phrase, a paragraph, a page’ which might be expanded and developed (Calkins, 1994, pp. 38-39).

Ideas for developing a seed include:

I think … I feel… I wonder… chart
Mind maps
PMI chart (plus, minus, interesting)
Y chart (looks, feels, sounds like...)
Three by three—list three-word phrases for three minutes
Capture what is important—try to capture feelings and emotions
Drawings and sketches
Collections of artefacts in a ‘seed box’.

The generation of ideas is only the beginning. It is the teacher’s role to support the extension and elaboration of the ‘seeds’ which might become a more detailed plan, a draft or a published text.

While not all ideas will be seen through to a ‘final’ copy, it is the role of the teacher to monitor students’ writing to ensure experiences which progress their writing through the various processes of writing, and across a range of text types, are provided each term and across the school year.

Some key points about the Writer’s Notebook

Children write best about the things that are important to them and what they are interested in. It is writing that comes from what they know and what they have experienced. A Writer’s Notebook is a tool that students use to record the things they notice, observe, and think about. Each recording is called an ‘entry’. The entries can be any of a variety of ideas. The most common are memories, observations of the things happening around them, descriptions of people and places important in their lives, opinions, wonderings, wishes, family stories, hobbies and other passions.
A Writer’s Notebook houses ideas that writers can return to in order to grow ideas, restructure, rethink, revise, connect ideas and ultimately choose from a variety of entries to publish for an audience. It supports the work of publishing.
Notebook writing encourages a writer to take to the ‘long view’. What might start off as a small undeveloped idea has the potential to be developed into something fully formed.
Students need daily sustained periods of time to write. The writer’s notebook helps give direction to those sustained times for writing, especially early in the year when establishing a classroom community that will support students’ writing throughout the year.

References

Buckner, A. (2005). Notebook know-how: Strategies for the Writer's Notebook. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Calkins, L.M. (1994). The art of teaching writing. (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Calkins, L.M. (2011). A curricular plan for the writing workshop: Grade K. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Calkins, L. & Ehrenworth, M. (2016). Growing extraordinary writers: Leadership decisions to raise the level of writing across a school and a District. The Reading Teacher, 70(1), 7 -18.

Yours in Literacy

Tania Purton & Jo Taylor

Literacy Coordinators