[Love2nd]

use journals? I'd like to have my kiddo's begin writing in a journal every day at the end of the day to wind down. I think it's a good time to begin this because at this point in time they are able to "sound out" mostly all of the sounds they hear in a word and can put words into complete sentences.

I'd love to hear how you use journals in your class, expectations, prompts, are they independent.. etc.

Thanks!

[Rosieo]

I started journals the first week of school. I gave them sentence starters like "My favorite food is _____." They filled in the blank and drew a picture.

Now I do journals on Mondays and Fridays.

Mondays - What did you do over the weekend? This saves me the time from each kid running up to me on every Monday morning.

Fridays - Free choice, they can write about whatever they want. I find out some interesting things!

Right now I require them to write one full page. I do not hep them with spelling, they can either sound out the word or use their personal dictionaries.

[wondergirl]

I do journals three days a week - sometimes there's a prompt, sometimes not. What I did this year and am loving it is this: The children come in on journal day and begin drawing the picture in their journal. During our writing period on those days, the children then right about their picture - saves on them only drawing and not writing etc. I've also tried to give them time to share their journal entry before writing it as many need that oral first.

[carroll]

We write in journals daily and it is always a free write. The kids get the story paper until the spring with the big space for the picture and then the lines. I go to just lined paper in March or April depending upon my group. We do this first thing as the kids come in. They get settled and grab their journal. Don't need any morning work, this way.

[jane.plessl]

I have used journals since the first day of first grade. In the beginning it was a starter sentence with the student filling in the blank. An example is My favorite food is ______. cNow I give them a starter topic and they have to write 3 complete sentences about the topic. Almost all can do this successfully and they are becoming great writers. I also take a good entry from the day and put it on the board and we discuss the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the story. We do our journal writing in the morning as the students filter in my room from 7:40 to 8:10.