Journaling

Interactive classroom journals give my students the liberty to express their own ideas about rigorous curriculum, provide peer support to build a coalition in learning, and practice the English language development domains of reading and writing. In a nutshell, this is a powerful instructional strategy that targets multiple areas of the whole child while learning. Every day of ESOL instruction, I place a prompt on the whiteboard asking students to write a letter to a classmate about a specific topic. These topics range from how the student is feeling about academic material, connections between the content material and students real lives, or simply as a review strategy to discuss something we have learned the day before. Then, students will switch journals, and respond to one another. This way, they are strengthening their reading and writing skills in a low-stress manner. I inform my students that these journals are not graded- rather they simply get credit for completing a written passage. This strategy is used for students who are in second grade and above, once they are ready to work on the domain of writing. The first image below is an example of a second-grade journal entry (this student is my only second-grader, which is why I was the one who responded). We were working on a Seasons unit. The student was able to apply what we were learning in class to his own life, by selecting and writing about his favorite season. The second image below is of a fourth-grade journal entry completed during The Great Heart unit. You can see how the student was able to use this instructional strategy to also make text-to-self connections by writing how their family has a great heart.