Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading/Writing Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers
are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about
supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing
teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion.
Juli also posts a weekly journal entry from her reading/writing classroom.
This year, Juli will focus on her efforts to integrate subject matter into
her reading and writing workshop approach. In her first
journal of the year, she explains the rationale behind this move and
some of her thinking about how she hopes to accomplish this goal.
Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing
Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals,
find out how here.
2003-04 Reading/Writing
Workshop Journal
Week #23
My Spring Break-through
It's time for the infamous "Spring Cleaning." I've got wood
floor cleaner, Windex, my feather duster, and anything else you could hope
to use to make your house spotless. I've even brushed up on "how to
clean." My new goal was to become a domestic goddess. But all that
has turned to dust. The windows will just have to wait until summer.
It's Spring Break, and instead of scouring, I'm curled up on the TV room
couch watching videos -- videos of teacher/author Cris Tovani. This new
set of four VHS tapes from Stenhouse Publishers is titled Comprehending
Content, Reading Across the Curriculum, Grades 6-12. It's a perfect
fit for my focus this year on content literacy in science.
So, off "to the movies" I go. My mission? To discover what Aurora,
Colorado (that's where Cris works) has to do with my teaching context.
I start with the 28-page "Viewing Guide." It gives guidance and
suggestions for facilitators of groups watching the videos. Since I'm on
my own, I treat the guide as my facilitator and follow several of the suggestions
for how to get the most out of my viewing. I'll read the discussion questions
ahead of time and pick one as a focus question to prompt my thinking. Then,
as I'm watching I'll take the guide's suggestion and use notes on a two-column
chart to record my thinking. It's described as "a kind of double entry
diary or journal."
TO READ Juli's further comments
and her two-column notes
for Tapes 1-4, please download this small PDF file!
Read next week's journal
Read last week's journal
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
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