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Writing about reading: offering students choice in reading responses

When I first began teaching, Nancie Atwell's In The Middle was my go to PD book for all things to do with reading and writing workshop. I modeled so many of my teaching practices on what I learned through that book and through a few workshops with Nancie. More than anything else, I wanted to create the environment Nancie had, one in which each of my students would feel the same sense of passion and personal investment in their reading and writing lives.

Among my "I must do this in my classroom" activities was Nancie's once a week literary letters from and to her students. "Through our correspondence my students learn ... about the worlds of writing and literature," she wrote, "what good writers do, what good readers do, how readers of literature think and talk, what books are good for, and how kids can get in on it." A rich reading life is closely connected to a rich writing life, I think, one fuels and inspires the other. I wanted my kids to experience this connection, so I began the practice of these once a week letters in my class, too. And, just as it had for Nancie, these letters became important conversations between my students and myself.

We wrote back and forth about themes, characters, ideas and life. With each book they read, class readaloud, shared discussion, and minilesson, my students grew as readers and became comfortable navigating varied literary landscapes. Their letters reflected this growth - they became a place in which to experiment with ideas, pose interesting questions, wonder about characters and story lines. There was no specific format, no page specifications or particular questions they had to answer. These letters evolved naturally, and their content reflected my students' real time reading experiences. I loved the way these letters allowed me to nudge thinking, make suggestions, pose questions - they were an extension, really, of my reading conferences, as well as an authentic way in which to assess reading workshop. My students loved the letters, too, and many said it was one of the things they missed most about their reading lives after they'd left sixth grade.

Even after Nancie published The Reading Zone, in which she rethought the purpose and structure of the literary letters, and moved over to letter-essays once every three weeks, I didn't see the need to change practices in my own classroom. My kids were reading lots of wonderful books, and they were also writing lots of wonderful letters: the literary letters were working for us.

But, there were some doubts I'd had from the beginning which continued to nag:

how much time was spent writing about reading as opposed to ?

my struggling readers sometimes needed help composing these letters - wouldn't it be better for them if they spent this time with me being guided in their reading as opposed to their writing about reading?

sometimes my kids would add a sketch or diagram to their letters, sometimes a picture from a magazine or a snippet from a newspaper, and these gave me added insights into their thinking - how could I act upon and grow these ideas?

was this weekly letter becoming a chore rather than an authentic response to reading?

And then I was lucky enough to spend a whole week with Mary Ehrenworth at the TCRWP Summer Institute. In her characteristically enthusiastic way, backed up with tons of supporting research into best practices, Mary reiterated the one essential truth about reading workshop: the primary goal was to keep our kids reading...a lot. Yes, part of our reading instruction is to teach our kids how to be able to critique literature, and to how to articulate their ideas about literature in well written essays and reading responses. But, our kids need options - they need other avenues through which to express their ideas. Mary shared some beautiful examples of creative approaches to reading responses:

The journals were lovely to look at, but, more importantly, they expressed such a range and depth of thought and creativity. I knew immediately that my own students would love the opportunity to do work like this. After all, bits and pieces of art work had been filtering into their literary letters already, my kids were definitely ready for this!

In the new school year, I introduced the idea of "creative reading responses" midway through the second quarter, once I had laid the groundwork for reading workshop, and after we'd spent some time exchanging our usual literary letters.

I created a simple list of some ideas they could tackle :

The "creative reading response": making your thinking visible
The Title The characters A powerful scene An unexpected turn of events The setting - or a change in setting The mood of the story A series of important scenes Thought shots Symbols which represent ideas or characters in the book Emotions Words Images Phrases Details Questions
"Let's see what you can do!" I challenged them one Monday morning, and then I waited to see what they would come up with. That Friday, the day of our first gallery walk, they blew me away:

Creative response for Olive's Ocean

Creative response for The Hunger Games

Creative response for Gregor, The Overlander - contrasting worlds characters can inhabit within a single text.

Creative response for The Book Thief - important events in a character's progress through a novel

My kids were so excited to see what everyone else had created, how their classmates had made their "reading thinking" visible. As they walked round the classroom marvelling at each others' varied responses to literature, they were also learning new ways to respond to texts - titles and symbols came alive, settings were beautifully described through maps. Best of all, some of the most stunning work came from my struggling readers and writers, here was a wonderful way to express their thoughts and ideas!

Over time, I introduced other reading response ideas I had learned at TC:

Creating an "emotional time line" as a way of explaining thoughts about a character's development over the course of a book.

Being able to cite evidence for theories about the text:

:

"Writing long" from sticky note jottings:

And, over time, my kiddos came up with some ideas of their own:

heart maps for characters

a letter from one character to another, and the response

letters of advice to a character

a character or novel scrapbook page

character Twitter chats

Facebook pages

Last summer, after another learning-packed Summer Institute workshop, Mary Ehrenworth generously offered to share more student samples on the TCRWP website, truly a treasure trove of reading response ideas: http://readingandwritingproject.com/resources/student-work/student-reading-notebook-samples . I keep a notebook filled with reading response ideas and examples from my students, and from PD books, teacher blogs, and workshops I attend, as well as a class binder of examples for my kids to refer to.

I introduce these ideas one at a time, spaced over many weeks. They become part of our literary tool box, one we can reach into when we respond to our texts for independent reading, book clubs, and readalouds. They also become the foundation for more complex tasks like forming thematic analysis across various texts, and writing literary essays. Yes, we still write our literary letters once a month or so, but in the weeks between we get to change things up a bit. Because these days in room 202, we have choice in how we respond to our texts. It has, I think, made our reading experiences richer and deeper, and my students love this freedom of choice .

This has been, as Martha Stewart would say, a.

We would love to hear more of your thoughts on writing about reading in a Two Writing Teachers community get-together of sorts. Please join us on February 3 at 8:30EST for a Twitter Chat on Writing about Reading. Please use the hashtag #TWTBlog. We hope to see you there!

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Writing about reading: offering students choice in reading responses

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When I first began teaching, Nancie Atwell's In The Middle was my go to PD book for all things to do with reading and writing workshop. I modeled so many of my teaching practices on what I learned through that book and through a few workshops with Nancie.

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Setting up the reading journal for a year of writing about reading

Ever since I began teaching, my students' reading journals have been as much "the gateway to all the work we will be doing from September to June" (to borrow a phrase from a post I wrote about writing notebooks) in reading workshop, as their writing journals are in writing workshop. On the first day of school, after I've sent my kids home to complete their reading and writing surveys for their first assignment, my homework is to cover all my students' new reading journals (college ruled composition books) in sturdy brown paper, so as to ensure that they will survive the workout they receive day in and day out; for our reading journals serve as a repository for all the thinking and responding work that goes into meaningful reading. This year, as part of my continuing journey as a teacher who practices what she teaches, I am going to keep a reading journal myself:

We organize these notebooks (on average, my students fill two notebooks with their reading-thinking over the course of the year) in the same way as our writer's notebooks: minilessons in the back, and journal entries in the front. We also save pages (dogeared together and tabbed) for:

our running lists of "books I just HAVE to read!" so we are never without reading plans

a new section this year, borrowed from Donalyn Millers Reading in the Wild, the genre requirements tally chart (pgs. 192 - 193). Here's what Donalyn has to say about the merits of this important practice: "The genre requirements graph helps students identify their preferences and areas of growth by documenting their reading choices over time. Recognizing their reading preferences helps them develop an accurate portrait of themselves as readers with specific likes and dislikes...These preferences provide a foundation for building reading relationships and offer insights into students' needs...". I will be using Donalyn's version of the chart (because, why mess with genius?!):

the first page is also new and borrowed from Donalyn - a personal reading graffiti (pgs 113 - 116) collection of memorable quotes from the books we read. This will be a more personal version of our class Reading Graffiti Wall. Here's mine with the quote I so loved from Lisa Graff's Absolutely Almost (our first read aloud of the year!):

a list of ideas about what to write about in our reading letters

a ribbon to mark where we are/what we want to reference (a particular mini lesson, for instance)

(More importantly) What "reading work" goes in our reading journals:

Reading response letters:

These are, of course, taken directly from Nancie Atwell's In The Middle - one of my key go to texts for all things to do with reading and writing workshop, who described the value of these letters this way:

"Each year of letters about books teaches me about adolescent readers - their needs, concerns, and tastes. I learn the value of inviting kids to read as real readers do...and I learn how to respond to what readers are trying to do...Through our correspondence my students learn, too, about the worlds of writing and literature - what good writers do, what good readers do, how readers of literature think and talk, what books are good for, and how kids can get in on it." (p. 263)

Linda Rief, whose students also keep Writing-Reading-Notebooks, echoes this sense of purpose in her books Seeking Diversity and Read, Write, Teach:

"I believe writing helps them become better readers, and reading helps them become better writers...I believe that talk or writing about some of their reading helps them unfold the layers of significance for them and from the author and that the more they read and talk about their thinking as they read, the more they will discover the craft of writing. The more they read and write, the more they learn about themselves and the world." (RWT: pg.44)

Although I struggled in the beginning to find a way to adapt this type of correspondence to my sixth graders' needs and developmental abilities (not to mention my own capacity for reading each of them carefully and writing back just as thoughtfully), it has remained an important aspect of our reading workshop routines. I love receiving these letters, I enjoy writing back, and I value the way it this exchange with my students allows me a personal glimpse into their reading lives - another means of conferring with them, assisting them, assessing their needs and progress, sharing our reading journeys. My students write to me about every other week, and they write to each other during book clubs or genre studies. We create a chart labelled "What can we write about our reading lives?" at the end of our first week of school, and we add onto this as the year progresses and we discover (as a class) how authors create wonderful literature, and how readers make meaning of these stories.

Letters from students reveal so much about them, about how and why they read, and about what they are gleaning from their books. Here is Sophie, doing exactly this:

"Now that I am getting to the end of the series, I have been getting a really strong sense of the author's message. Burned has many messages, really, but the one that really popped out to ME was the fact that you have to believe in something you really care about and work at it. This is important in life, because sometimes you need to ignore what other people think is true for you and kinda create your own truth. Meaning, you have to think outside the box and figure out your own truths. Right? Does that make sense to you?"

Or Sarah, writing about two characters in Endymion Spring:

"I'm not sure why, but I like Julian. I think that he and Blake have some sort of connection or partnership. What I mean by this is a special originally-made connection, this is how I choose my mitt for softball. My dad thinks it's stupid, but I choose my mitt if we can work together as one. That's how I think Blake and Julian are. They connect to each other and work together better, just like my mitt and I are one on the field - a connected to each other team."

And Sam, working through some issues in his book, The Sight:

"I'm just starting to really get into this book because I finally figured out how to deal with something SO ANNOYING about it. The creatures in this book have their own language, and they use words but don't say what they mean. You have to figure it out each time. Like drappa for girl and dragga for boy. So, I was always like "huh? what's he even talking about?" But now that figured out how to look for clues, I made a bookmark with all of them. Like my own glossary. IMHO, the author should have done that. But, anyways, I figured it out so I'm good with the series from here on."

I never ask for summaries of books my students are reading anymore, since (as one of them informed me some time ago) "It's really easy to get them from Amazon or Goodreads - it's like there and done for you, you know." Right. Sixth graders are nothing if not honest.

And I always write back. There is nothing more pointless than a reading journal (and I have seen many of these) filled with letters from students responded to this way: "Great reading!" " Good points!" " Check +!" What is the point of this? And what a waste of (what could be instead) precious reading time!

My students gather notes as they read and discuss their books, and their reading journals become a place to collect their thinking, write about their ideas, and use for reference when we write literary essays. These are messy, work-in-progress pages which reflect how thinking changes as we discuss the books we read:

A selection of choice in reading responses:

I wrote a post about this here at Two Writing Teachers, which reflected a change in my thinking about the format of reading responses. Our kids benefit from choice, and their responses are more authentic when they can find methods that truly reflect their thinking. This point was driven home for me this summer when I tutored a few rising 7th. graders, all of whom felt that the one thing they hated most about reading was - the reading response assignment: it was always the same format, and no one ever really read it. Point taken. We trade notebooks, and have gallery walks to help make this process a shared learning experience.

New pathways to deepen our understanding of reading:

I am always discovering new ways of doing this, thanks to the amazing educators who research and write books and blogs to illuminate the path. For example, Kate Roberts wrote a brilliant post : T he Five Corners of the Text: Close Reading and Personal Experience that got my wheels spinning, as did just about every post by Vicki Vinton (here's one I keep returning to). We experiment with making great ideas about reading visible in our reading journals - it's messy work, and sometimes we get nowhere - but that's the way real learning goes.

Two books that gave me much to think about and which I will be writing more about once the school year gets underway are:

I think every reading teacher needs to read these books...asap! As for me, I am thinking through ways in which to weave Vicki and Dorothy's amazing work into reading workshop this year, work that we will make visible in our reading journals as well.

So there you have it: the life and times of reading journals in Room 202. Some years ago, our kindly custodian mistook the pile of reading journals I had stacked by my desk for trash...so out they went. The next morning, when my distraught kids and I had figured out what had happened, we went dumpster diving and retrieved them all - slightly soiled and slightly smelly, but oh what a relief to have them (and all the work they represented) back in our hands again; our reading journals are important enough to warrant search and rescue missions!

Please share how you write about reading in your reading workshops - we'd love to learn about it.

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Setting up the reading journal for a year of writing about reading

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Ever since I began teaching, my students' reading journals have been as much "the gateway to all the work we will be doing from September to June" (to borrow a phrase from a post I wrote about writing notebooks) in reading workshop, as their writing journals are in writing workshop.

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Writing About Reading Blog Series

Back in November, we asked you, our readers, which topics you would like us to explore for our next Blog Series. The overwhelming majority answered "Writing About Reading." We were thrilled with this response, since writing about reading was high on our interest list as well.

This week, we are pleased to bring you our Writing About Reading Blog Series!

When I was a classroom teacher, writing about reading often vexed me. I knew I wanted my students to write about their thinking while reading. I knew writing about reading was important, but I never really knew how to go about it. I assigned a weekly Letter to the Teacher, but these letters were often simply book summaries. I tried teaching into the weekly letters, explaining (over and over again) how I wanted the students to write their thinking about their reading, not just a summary of their book. I modeled my own letters. Still, I always felt as though these letters fell flat.

Today, with the Common Core State Standards outlining the expectations that students will be able to read a text closely, cite evidence from a text, analyze story elements, determine central ideas, interpret words and phrases, etc., it is more important than ever that students are able to do some of this heavy thinking on paper. It is more important than ever that students are able to write about their reading.

So, this week, we offer you several explorations of writing about reading for your classroom. Our schedule for the week is as follows:

Today, I will share three ways for students to write about their thinking while reading.
On Tuesday, Anna will offer a quick guide to literary essays.
On Wednesday, Stacey will write about crafting notebook entries in response to books and articles.
On Thursday, Tara will blog about offering our students choice in reading responses.
Finally, on Friday, Betsy will write about opinion writing in a K-1 collaboration.

Then, as a culminating event to our Blog Series, the Two Writing Teachers will host our first Twitter chat on Monday, February 3rd at 8:30 EST. Scroll down to the bottom of the post for more information! We hope you will join us to continue the discussion about writing about reading.

Let's get started.
Three Ways to Write about Thinking While Reading
1. Lifting a Line

I originally read about this method in Aimee Buckner's book Notebook Connections: Strategies for the Reader's Notebook. The idea is that students will copy, or lift, a line from their reading. Perhaps it is a line the reader found surprising or well-written or thought-provoking. The students copy the line on top of the page and then free write off the line. In this way, the lifted line becomes a fresh starting place or inspiration for new thinking.

Last week, the sixth graders at my school did a shared reading of an excerpt from Dragonfly: A Childhood Memoir by W. Nikola-Lisa. Afterwards, they lifted a line, and then they wrote off that line for ten minutes. Looking at the students' writing, I was able to see how they were thinking as readers.

As you can see above, this student showed evidence of:

visualizing

asking relevant questions

reading like a writer

This student:

is beginning to determine a central idea of the memoir

appreciates writing that is aesthetically pleasing

is asking relevant questions

The strategy of lifting a line prompts students to think deeply about a particular line of text.

2. Character Connections Web

This approach to writing about reading works well for older students who are reading texts containing an abundance of characters. I remember wishing I had done this when I read The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan - so many characters and relationships to remember! The gist of this approach is students make a web, or map, to track the characters and their relationships to each other. In the December 2013 issue of Time magazine, Dan Macsai and Noah Rayman review "The Year in Connections" on this two page spread:

Notice the connecting lines all represent different relationships - those who feuded, collaborated, or broke up, for example.

I showed this web to a group of 5th graders, and they went to work on tracking the characters in their novels.

Notice the multiple levels of relationships on this student's web of characters for Under the Cat's Eye by Gillian Rubenstein. Hugo is related to Jai, but also to Mr. Drake, who in turn in related to Jai, but also to Fern.

Another group of girls reading Flying Solo by Ralph Fletcher created this web of characters.

They chose to use different colors to represent different relationships, similar to the sample from Time magazine. Notice the key in the upper right hand corner:

3. Visual Note Taking

When I saw this blog post on A Year of Reading about visual note taking, I knew I had to try it. This method is quickly becoming my favorite way to take notes. Visual note taking uses a combination of colors, words, and images to capture important information. When I use visual note taking, I write down quotes that resonate with me, along with key words and phrases that summarize the central ideas. I switch colors as I feel the ideas shifting. I sketch images that capture the essence of what I'm thinking. I think of it as doodling-with-a-purpose.

These are my visual notes from a TED talk I recently watched titled, "What a Bike Ride Can Teach You" by Shimon Schoken.

Here is one page of my visual notes from the keynote speech by Gay Ivey and Maria Nichols at the Reading Recovery Conference this past week.

After introducing the concept of visual note taking to a group of sixth graders, I read aloud the first chapter of the book Little Audrey by Ruth White. As they listened, they took visual notes.

I was pleased with the level of detail the students captured in their visual notes, such as that Audrey calls her sisters "the three little pigs", or that Audrey has two different colored eyes. They also recorded the basic story elements in words or pictures, such as the setting of row houses in a coal mining town and the names of the main characters. I think visual note taking can not only serve as a way to keep students engaged with their reading, but also as a way to help them remember what they've read.

Lifting a line, creating a character connections web, and visual note taking are three ways for students to write about their reading. All three ways provide an opportunity for students to share their thinking, offering more than just a summary of the book. All three ways offer a glimpse into their minds as readers.

Visit again tomorrow for Anna's quick guide to the literary essay. Also, please remember to mark your calendars for our Twitter chat on Monday, February 3rd. We will be using the hashtag #TWTBlog. For more information, click here.

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Lifting a line, creating a character connections web, and visual note taking are three ways for students to write about their reading. All three ways provide an opportunity for students to share their thinking, offering more than just a summary of the book. All three ways offer a glimpse into their minds as readers.

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A Range of Reading Notebooks by Mary Ehrenworth

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An example of how you might model for students making a T-chart to keep track of their thoughts and evidence from the text