Just received the following email: Hi Ted! Hope all is well. My name is Evan Dickerson. I took your reader response notebook course over the summer. I was the only high school English teacher there. I wanted to share with you some of the work my eleventh-grade students have been doing at Nutley High School in Nutley, NJ. We're in a unit on evaluating fiction. Our focus questions are "Why are some stories considered 'timeless'? What makes a 'classic' piece of fiction?" To diversify their notebooks, I had students complete a sketch-to-stretch entry in which they had to "illustrate the central conflict of the story". Both the students and I were amazed by the results. They actually found that they thought more deeply about the sketches than they ever did while using a traditional box-and-bullets strategy. Thanks for sharing such valuable resources. They are definitely not just for elementary students! The entries you'r...
Blog posts about using the reader response notebook in classrooms.