Interactive Reading Journal

     This year, Duval county schools has revamped some of the classroom practices.  One of the new initiatives in our instruction is the interactive journal.  These are designed for students to capture their own learning.  Each lesson or benchmark has a notes page where the teacher prints out something and/or students take notes during the mini-lesson.  Then students do a page of independent practice.  This allows them to look back and use the notes page as a model.  Below are some pictures form my 3rd graders :)  I'm very excited about how they have been independently using these to hold themselves accountable for their own learning.

Each week students are given 7 vocabulary words.  During center rotation, they use picture cards, thesauruses, and dictionaries to find the meaning of each word.  They paste this flip book into their source-books each week to refer to.

As we've been reading Charlotte's Web, we have been creating character trait playing cards.  For each character, students create a card listing the character traits.  As the characters change throughout the story, the character card is added to.  This made several character development activities so much easier!  Students can quickly pull out their cards and refer to the notes they've taken.

This is an example of a teacher-directed notes page.  Students pasted the nonfiction text feature, then as we discussed each one they made their own notes.  This has really helped teach a somewhat complicated concept.  As we read nonfiction and point out important text features, they can quickly refer back to these notes.