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WritingFix: Tools for a Writing Classroom...A Writer's Notebook
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Tools for a Writing Classroom: A Writer's Notebook
a well-kept writer's notebook or a creative journal or is the foundation of any writers workshop

Inspiring a youth to begin a writer's notebook?  At WritingFix, we love the book A Writer's Notebook: Unlocking the Writer within You by Ralph Fletcher. It's a fast read, and a true inspiration to anyone who writes or thinks they should do more writing.  We have given out hundreds of copies of this powerful little book to educators who are interested in being better writing teachers.

A writer's notebook is a tool every writer should use.  In its pages, a writer experiments with ideas and writing styles in a non-threatening way.  A writer's notebook is like a journal or a diary, except that it relies rarely on daily narrations to fill its pages.  Instead of daily accounts, each page in the writer's notebook focuses on a topic--past, present, or future--that the writer would like to some day explore more extensively; the notebook's writer explores topics in brain-friendly and creative ways.

We like to think of a writer's notebook as being similar to an artist's sketchbook.  Artists fill their sketchbooks' pages with rough drawings of randomly seen things they may or may not use in paintings someday.  Topics in a writer's notebook should be thought of as rough sketches, attempts by the writer to gain more perspective in a manner that isn't permanent and is totally disposable, if the writer chooses to never use it.
Resources for Inspiring Better Writer's Notebooks:

WritingFix's Random List Idea Generator

"My seventh grade and eighth grade students keep a writer's notebook, which I collect and read each week.  Often they're looking for ideas to write an entry, and they love your list-making page.  I regard this as an effective tool; it's all about ownership in choosing your topics, and WritingFix does it for me!"

- Jacquie Leighton
  Hancock Grammar School, Maine

Here's a fun, word-play lesson--created by WritingFix lesson author Dena Harrison--from our collection of poetry prompts. This lesson would work wonderfully as a dedicated page in your students' notebooks.

Lesson title: Nash-ing the Animals

Lesson's mentor text: Selected poems by Ogden Nash

Lesson's focus trait: Word Choice (word play)
Lesson's support trait: Idea Development (original ideas)

Lesson summary: Everyone loves the poetry of Ogden Nash!  His silly style and word play entertain people of all ages.  For this mini-lesson, students will discuss some of Mr. Nash’s poetry on animals and write their own short poem(s), imitating his style, in their writer’s notebooks. 

Dedicating notebook pages to interesting ideas and language explorations

At WritingFix, we encourage writers to devote pages of their writer's notebooks to fun word-study and smaller writing tasks.  To label a notebook page "Haikus," and then to return to the page throughout the year whenever a new haiku has occurred to you...well, we think that's a fine use of a writer's notebook.

Here are some of our favorite word-study and smaller writing tasks you might devote a page of your notebook to:

Here's a great lesson from the collection of chapter book prompts that WritingFix began in 2006. In the book Chasing Vermeer, the main character--Petra--keeps a writer's notebook, and in chapter three, we witness her describing things she sees by using words that an artist would paint with. This lesson requires students to create a descriptive paragraph, inspired by the writing Petra writes in her writer's notebook.

Lesson title: Writing Like an Artist Paints

Lesson's mentor text: Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett

Lesson's focus trait: Idea Development (using strong and memorable details)
Lesson's support trait:Word Choice (using words that make the reader think of art)

Lesson summary: The writer will compose a descriptive paragraph that focuses on some object moving quickly past a character who is standing still.  Like Balliett does in Chasing Vermeer, the writer will use a healthy (both controlled) dose of artistic words, so the written scene comes across as painting-like.  The goal is to make writers more aware of the power of using words creatively in writing.
 
More writer's notebook ideas to come soon! Keep checking back with us!
   

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