Making the Most of Reading Notebooks

Reading Notebooks... we love them, we struggle with them, we know they can be used much more effectively. In our books What Do I Teach Readers Tomorrow? we wrote a whole chapter on how to help students use them authentically so that we teachers can use them to make instructional decisions.

Let's take a look inside the book at a few of its many resources.

A whole chapter about reading notebooks- how to set them up and how to use them for decision-making

We researched students to find out why they say they write about reading in school. The results are not surprising, but definitely upsetting.

We included lots of student notebook entry examples with our annotations so you can learn from them, and also so you can show them to your students as examples of what they might choose to do.

There are several lessons for how to help students choose to write authentically and with purpose about their reading and use it as a tool to develop thinking.

There are self-reflection questionnaires to help guide your next steps with reading notebooks. In fact, we have a few of these throughout the book. Think of it as a Glamour magazine quiz for us nerdy teachers.

At the end of the chapter there is an action plan so you have an idea where and how to get started. We don't want to overwhelm you so we did this for every chapter.

Every chapter, including this one, has several videos of us teaching, reflecting, and making our decision-making process visible to you. You can access them on the Corwin website http://resources.corwin.com/GoldbergHouser-Nonfiction or with the QR codes in the book. (Note: The videos will be live on February 20, 217)