Well, we started off the year GREAT! by building our classroom tribe with positive vibes about high self esteem, building friendships, and embracing differences. Now it's time to start managing classroom routines. Here are a few ways we manage reader's and writer's notebooks in our classroom:
We house our reader's, writer's, and focused poetry/mentor sentence notebooks in the classroom. This keeps them from being "lost" and in good working condition. We all know how scary a child's desk can be, so this saves everyone's sanity.
Next, we organize them by table group bins and assign a table captain for the week. The table captain's job is to hand out and pick up notebooks on a daily basis. It seems to work well when one person is assigned the specific job. Otherwise everyone claims they didn't know it wasn't put away.
To assist our students and table captains, we color code the notebooks by using a small strip of colorful duct tape. The students easily recognize the corresponding color for the notebooks. In this case, pink is our writer's notebook, green is our reader's notebook, and silver is our focused poetry/mentor sentence notebook. This simple task is a MAJOR time saver!
In the past we would number sections in our notebooks. Each section would be a certain number of pages - for example, our writer's notebook would be 75 pages then the word study section would begin at page 76. A BIG HEADACHE! We really didn't know how many pages we needed for each section, so our guess at the beginning of the year was always wrong.
Now we divide our notebooks by starting one section in the front (ex: Writer's notebook) and one section in the back (ex: Word Study).
Next, we tab different units by using the Post-It tabs throughout the school year as we move onto another unit. It seems to simplify the notebook and keep our students way more organized than every before.
Several of our TPT units are designed to be used with our classroom notebooks. Here are a few listed below with links:
Focused Poetry
Poetry Unit
Establishing Reader's Notebooks
Word Study Units
Got any neat tricks to share about how you use or organize notebooks in your classroom? We would love to hear your ideas!
To assist our students and table captains, we color code the notebooks by using a small strip of colorful duct tape. The students easily recognize the corresponding color for the notebooks. In this case, pink is our writer's notebook, green is our reader's notebook, and silver is our focused poetry/mentor sentence notebook. This simple task is a MAJOR time saver!
In the past we would number sections in our notebooks. Each section would be a certain number of pages - for example, our writer's notebook would be 75 pages then the word study section would begin at page 76. A BIG HEADACHE! We really didn't know how many pages we needed for each section, so our guess at the beginning of the year was always wrong.
Now we divide our notebooks by starting one section in the front (ex: Writer's notebook) and one section in the back (ex: Word Study).
Next, we tab different units by using the Post-It tabs throughout the school year as we move onto another unit. It seems to simplify the notebook and keep our students way more organized than every before.
Several of our TPT units are designed to be used with our classroom notebooks. Here are a few listed below with links:
Focused Poetry
Poetry Unit
Establishing Reader's Notebooks
Word Study Units
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