Teacher to Teacher: Mining Your Writer’s Notebook
By Lynne R. Dorfman
According to Ayres and Shubitz (2010, 101), “Writer’s notebooks are the open-arms that pull students into writing.” They talk about the value of reflecting on everyday living and ordinary moments. Every human being is a story teller. Each day we wake up with a brand-new page to write on. It is a page in the story of our lives, making our day-to-day experiences important and worth writing about. Fletcher (2001, 26) says that most professionals consider a writer’s notebook as essential to their writing process. For us, it is a place where we can write and share pieces of our writing with our students so they can see us as writers, too. For our students, it is a place where they can engage in risk taking since notebook entries are not graded. As we guide students to return to their notebooks as often as possible, we are helping them to lead a writerly life and establish their unique writer’s identity.
The value in a writer’s notebook is not simply writing in it every day or nearly every day. The true value of a notebook is to be able to return to it whenever you like, for myriad purposes. To mine a notebook, you probably should keep one for at least three weeks or so. Try writing in it to record observations, make lists, try out memory chains, hand maps, heart maps, and neighborhood maps. Create snapshots with words of people, places, and objects. Read more
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