Journaling

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Journaling
By Elizabeth

I uselined pages with a blank spot at the top for a picture. Each day my students start their day with the same routine; unpack, sign in, start journal page, then daily language review. While they are working I am greeting
students as they enter the room, taking lunch count and all the other housekeeping of the day. When I'm done with all of that I sit at the writing center and the students who are finished come up and read their journal to me. I write the dictionary spelling underneath their words and later in the year I point out the conventions of writing that we have been working on. They learn

proofreading marks for making capitals and punctuation and will go to fix those on their own about halfway through the year. After they are done the students file (in an open file crate)their journals in their file. This is the first 30 minutes of the day. It is a lot of time but each student is virtually getting a language experience story per day. In November, February and May the journals are plastic spiral bound into seasonal books that they are so proud of! After the first binding they are so motivated they want to do several journals per day!