Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Organizing the Classroom: Keeping Track of Journals

Heart Notebook by Midnight A

Do your students use journals in class? Many schools use journals for kids, and keeping track of them can be a difficult task, both for the new teacher and the veteran. Here’s a tip for dealing with this organization problem.

If you are like most new teachers, you have great plans to read every child’s journal and make your own comments on a daily basis. That sounds wonderful in theory, but have you often found yourself facing a pile of 25 or more student journals – all waiting for you to read and comment in? It is easy to let the pressures of day to day teaching, testing, record keeping and discipline put your great plans for reading those journals on the back burner, and before you know it, you have that ominous pile facing you – and no time to really sit and read each and every one.

Here is a tip for new teachers to help manage this situation.

  • Begin by dividing the number of students you have in class by four. That will give you a group of students for each day of the week, Monday through Thursday, with no one scheduled on Friday, for reasons that will be explained below.
  • Next, assign a different color to each of the four days of the week – Monday through Thursday. So, for example, Monday’s color is blue, Tuesday’s is red, and so on.
  • Now, using those “daily” colors and your student groups formed above, mark a large star, circle or other symbol on the cover of each student’s journal in the corresponding color. You may use colored markers, or you might want to use colored stickers or other symbols for this. In fact, you can choose any “grouping” that you want – perhaps using favorite fairy tale characters, meal items, whatever your students will enjoy.

Whatever symbol or color you use, you will now have the journals divided into four groups – be they the red-blue-green-orange grouping or the cookie-candy-ice cream-cake grouping.

Now it is easy to manage those journals. Each day, just collect one group – the red group for example – and you will have a much easier number to read and respond to. In a class of 24, that will be only 6 a day to read – a much more manageable task than trying to do all 24 at once.

So – why only 4 groups? The extra day, presumably Friday, gives you a chance to get caught up with any students who were absent on the day their journal was collected, or if you happen to miss one or two for some other reason. So on your “unassigned” day – just collect and read those you missed during the week. Using this method, you have an easy way to organize these classroom materials and make reading and responding to journals a snap!

Original copyright 2007 +Irene Taylor.  Permission to republish this article in print or online must be granted by the author of this blog in writing.