What are the Texts in our Lives

A 5th grade teacher in NJ, Julie Roccanova, had her students share "What are the texts in our lives?" as a first day of school activity. "They loved it. They totally got the idea that texts and ideas are everywhere and they were really motivated to start their independent reading and jotting after using this as a jumping off point."

I share more of these ideas in Chapter 2 of The Reader Response Notebook: Teaching Towards Agency, Autonomy, and Accountability.

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The Reader Response Notebook Overview

The Reader Response Notebook By Ted Kesler The reader response notebook (RRN) is a ubiquitous tool in schools. In at least grades 2 through 8, teachers rely on this notebook as evidence of students’ reading. In my extensive visits to schools around the country, I noticed a common application for this notebook: students write summaries of the books they read, or respond to a teacher prompt, such as “Describe the main character” or “Tell what new information you learned from this text,” and always “Be sure to provide text evidence.” Ultimately, response after response by students are expository paragraphs or essays that are often solely directed to and read by the teacher for evaluation. Responses soon become monotonous, devoid of voice and intention. Here is an example from one of my 3 rd grader students in my early years of classroom teaching: The student met all the criteria for this response. She started wit...

What an incredible day observing the RRN in action as a tool for thinking to support students' discourse about their books in Dr. Dina Weiss's 4th grade classroom. Students had such a variety of ways of responding to realize themes in their novels with pronounced social justice themes.

Dina Weiss, 4th grade teacher, also uses the RRN with her undergraduate students at Queens College. Dina reports: QC students are developing their own reading responses that are accumulated in a journal for the purpose of showing their future students how to respond to text meaningfully. It's an assignment in my syllabus that they create a reading response, mentor journal that they can use during strategy group work to help students build their comprehension. Here are some more photos. One of the QC students took it upon herself to create a new reading responses. She merged her love of art with the reading response work. She understood the power of reading responses to elevate a students deep thinking of a text. She made an Instagram page for a character, she visually showed the complexity of problems a character was having, and I she showed the intersection of theme and complexity of character relationships using a color-coded system. ...

Reader Response Notebooks

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