Journal Writing Activities

Last week, I was with a teacher who was having a difficult time helping his fourth-grade students write about one of the books they were reading in class. The problem was the students didn’t really understand the variety of ways they could write about a book they were reading. Most of the students thought that a book report was a way for them to retell the story, so that the teacher would know they had read it. This change may be a positive one or negative one. To help solve this problem of writing a journal, I gave the students an interactive writing activity on the computer.


A good book makes you think about things in fresh ways. You just can't help reacting to the story. By keeping a journal, you can explore some of your responses and ideas as you read. The interactive writing activity has an on-screen guide which walks them through writing a journal step-by-step. The activity even inserted forms right into their document to better structure their thinking and writing. There were drawings they could easily insert into their writing document to illustrate what they wrote. Now they were ready to imaging becoming one of the characters.

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