Notebook Know-How

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Strategies for the Writer's Notebook

Aimee Buckner

A writer's notebook is an essential springboard for students to brainstorm topics, play with leads and endings, tweak a new revision strategy, or test out a genre for the first time. In Notebook Know-How, Aimee Buckner provides the tools teachers need to make writers' notebooks an integral part of their writing programs. This compact guide shows how smart and focused use of writer's notebooks enhances and deepens literacy learning for students in grades 3–8, while also addressing many of the questions teachers ask when they start using notebooks, including how to launch a notebook and how to help students who are stuck in writing ruts.

"Reading this book, I felt my old passions rekindled, and remembered what drew me to this field in the first place. That's the best kind of teacher renewal I can imagine." —Ralph Fletcher (from the foreword)

Foreword by Ralph Fletcher

Product Details

Author: Aimee Buckner
Year: 2005
Grade Range: 3-8

Media: 152 pp/paper
ISBN: 978-157110-413-7
Item No.: WEB-0413

A writer's notebook is an essential springboard for the pieces that will later be crafted in writers' workshop. It is here that students brainstorm topics, play with leads and endings, tweak a new revision strategy, or test out a genre for the first time.

In Notebook Know-How, Aimee Buckner provides the tools teachers need to make writers' notebooks an integral part of their writing programs. She also addresses many of the questions teachers ask when they start using notebooks with their students, including:

How do I launch the notebook?
What mini-lessons can be used throughout the year to help students become more skilled in keeping notebooks?
How do I help students who are stuck in writing ruts with notebooks?
How do I help students use their learning from notebooks for other writing?
How do I organize notebooks so that the design is flexible, yet still allows students to access information easily?
How can writers' notebooks help students become better readers?
How do I assess notebooks?

This compact guide is packed with lessons, tips, and samples of student writing to help teachers make the most of writers' notebooks, without sacrificing time needed for the rest of the literacy curriculum. In fact, Notebook Know-How shows how smart and focused use of writers' notebooks enhances and deepens literacy learning in both reading and writing for students in grades 3–8.

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Contents
Foreword by Ralph Fletcher
Acknowledgments
1. Why Notebooks?
2. Launching the Notebook
3. Kneading Notebooks: Expanding Topics and Building Collections of Ideas
4. When Writers Read
5. Using Notebooks to Understand Genre
6. Writing Wrongs: Editing, Spelling, and Punctuation
7. Assessing the Notebook
Appendix
References

Aimee Buckner
Aimee Buckner is currently a fourth grade teacher at Brookwood Elementary School in Gwinnette County, Georgia. She has spent the past twelve years teaching and learning alongside her students.
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