List member Deborah Bova offered these journal prompts during a discussion of reading journals. We may post additional prompts if Deborah can find them! These prompts were discussed in our chat about grouping and differentiated instruction.


Prompts for Reading Journals



Many of these prompts are a combination of my original thinking and the wonderful ideas of Les Parsons from a book, Response Journals. [Read Parsons' latest book Response Journals Revisted online at the Stenhouse website.]

As I amble through teaching, I add more as they evolve in the course of my teaching. I still have not found my original list of about 50 suggested prompts, but I redid some in order to be able to provide you with more responses than I originally shared.

Perhaps I will find the list and my three books on roots, stems, and derivatives at the same time. They are all lost in one of my four moves in less than nine months.

Fiction


1. In today's reading, did the setting or any of the characters remind you of people or characters in your own personal life? We any of the situations or events similar to your own life? How were they alike and how were they different?

2. Does this story or its characters remind you of another story you have read? Does it remind you of a movie? How are they alike? And how are they different?

3. If you could change the setting in this story to another setting, what setting would you choose? Would you change just the time period? Or would you change the place, the season, the actual environment-one of poverty, riches, or middle class America? Why would you make those changes?

4. If you could change the life or lives of a story character, to make their lives more like the lives of the characters in the book or story you are reading, whose lives would you change? How would you change their lives? Why did you pick these people or that person?

5. If you were to put this story into your own life, in the area where you live, around the people and friends that you know, how would the story have to change? How would the people change? Would the setting have to change? Why would these changes have to take place?

6. Sometimes we are pulled toward one or two characters in the story. We identify with them or feel sympathy for them. With which characters do you identify in the book, and why do you believe you identify with them?

7. Sometimes when we read, certain words or phrases or images stand out. Maybe they are words or phrases that make an impression because of their sound, or maybe the meaning or image they make strikes us? Sometimes we find words or expressions we just do not understand. Share those that you have come across and describe why you listed them.


8. Now that you are this far into the story, what do you look forward to learning next? What conflicts or problems do you think the characters will face? What qualities of your character (honest, loyal, cruel, dishonest, angry, vengeful) will affect how the character handles the problems and conflicts he or she encounters?

9. If you could ask any character a question, what would you ask? If you could ask the author a question, what might that be? Explain why you chose these questions.


10. As you read today, what surprised you? Explain how this will affect the story or how it changed your thinking about the story.

11. When you wish to learn when you read again tomorrow; what do you hope will happen in the story or to the characters? Why do you wish for that to happen?

12. Are you puzzled or confused about anything in the story? What is it that confuses you, and why do you find it confusing?

13. It is not unusual to wish that our lives were more like the lives of characters in stories. How would you change your own real life to be more like the world of your story?

14. Why do you think the author wrote this story? Where did he or she get the idea or the characters? What message do you think that the author is trying to share?

Non-fiction


1. What did you learn today as you read that you did not know before? What surprised you? Explain why it surprised you?

2. As you read today, were any questions that you had answered by what you read? List the questions that you had and the answers that you came up with from the reading. Are you satisfied with what you learned, with these answers? Why or why not?

3. Did you come across a problem in your reading that you had not considered before? What was the problem? Could you solve it? How?

4. Are any of the real life situations or people that you read about in your material for today similar to situations that you have experienced before in life? How were they similar? How were they different?




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