Mrs. McDowell's Book Shelf

Friday, August 31, 2012

Seed Notebooks

Each day your child is given a prompt to write about in their journal.   Student's are given about 5 minutes to complete their journal entry.  That should be all the time they need, but students are welcome to take their journals home if they do not complete their entry before time is up.  We call our journals Seed Notebooks and look to them throughout the year to give us ideas to write about during Writer's Workshop.  We will  occasionally pick an idea from our seed notebook and grow it into a full blown writing piece that we take through the entire writing process: prewrite, draft, revise/edit and publish.  

I grade seed notebooks every Friday.  They are worth 15 points each week – 3 points for each entry.  (Last week's was 20 because I included extra points for format and next week's will be 12 because of the short week – but 15 points is what students can usually expect).  When it's all said and done seed notebook grades will probably make up about 1/3 of each student's writing grade each quarter.

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