Journals for Pre-K

Last year I started looking for ideas on Pinterest about journaling with preschoolers.  I came across a few pins that helped me get started:

Ten Tips for Keeping a Journal in Preschool

Pre-School Journaling

J is for Journal


After reading about how others started, organized and maintained their journals; I started making the decisions about how I would use the journals in my classroom.

I chose to use simple black and white composition books for our journals.  I used a name label sticker on the front of each child's journal and also made one for myself.

My class typically is most successful when I model expectations for them before they attempt a structured task like this.  Before the kids ever used their journal, I had all of the journals prepped and in a basket and I modeled drawing a picture in my journal.  Since most of the students in my class have language impairments, I wanted the focus of our journals based on increasing their communication skills.  After I drew my picture, I talked about it.  I labeled the picture, told the class a sentence about my picture.  We did this a few times, using the word journal and modeling how to draw, turn pages, choose the next page, etc.  The first time I passed out their journals at circle time, all we did was look at the journal and turn the blank pages.

We used our journals in a small group, structured center with adult support at first.  After all of the students started to understand the purpose and became more proficient at drawing their pictures, I would also put them out for a table activity or "morning work" first thing in the morning in a large group.

Since my goal was to help increase communication, every time the students worked in their journal, they talked to an adult (me, my assistant, a volunteer) about it and we wrote their exact words on the paper.  Through this, we also had ongoing documentation showing how their language skills improved over time.  You can see the length of utterance increases, use of age appropriate vocabulary, use of pronouns and use of action words.  This became a great way for  me to show parents what language skill I might be working on with a child and how they could help.

I also found that our science center was a great inspiration spot for lots of writing and observation.

Here are some photos of some of  our journal work:

And here are some from a different student:

Embedding Literacy

I'm wrapping up facilitating a very fast paced and intense course on language and literacy. Because of this, I have been engaged in a lot of thinking and reflecting about embedding language and literacy into daily lesson plans and routines.

I'd like to take a moment to share an idea that illustrates how a parent has embedded language and literacy into her child's day.

I drive through 3 school zones and countless bus stops on my way to work each morning. I often see parents waiting with their children at the bus stops.

One mom and her son (who appears to be 5 or 6 years old) used to wait for the bus each day in the manner that you would typically see....the boy had his backpack on, mom was next to him and they stood on the corner waiting for the bus.

For the past few weeks, as I have driven by, I have noticed that she now brings a camp chair (one of those canvas chairs that folds up and has a sleeve that it fits in...you can buy them at Wal Mart for about $10) and a book to the bus stop.

Now, each morning her son sits on her lap as she is reading a story to him.

Wow! So maybe they wait 5-10 minutes for the bus each day. That means her son is getting and extra 25-50 minutes of literacy and language experiences a week. If you multiply that times 36 weeks in a school year that is between 900-1800 minutes a year (or an extra 15-30 hours).

I think this is just so cool! She has figured out how to take a "waiting" period and has turned it into a language and literacy experience.

Sometimes we go nuts trying to figure out when to fit everything "in." This mom has found a way to give her child more literacy and language experiences within a routine that already exists.

How many other ways could we, as teachers or parents also do this? I bet the ways are quite creative and the number is countless!

Digital Photos and Oral Langauge Samples

I really like having digital photos of students engaged in classroom activites, field trips, or special events.

The digital camera is such a useful piece of technology because we can click away hoping to capture that one moment and not worry about wasting film.

I am very fortunate at my school because we have quite a few digital cameras available for teacher use and a number of color printers that can be used to print photos. We take tons of photos and use them to promote authentic, familiar language building experiences.

We start with photos of students playing or working in classroom tasks. At cirlce time or in small groups my assistant and I model how to talk about the picture. For some groups we work on labeling the objects or people in the picture. The next step is to use a 2-3 word phrase to tell about the picture and the action in the picture (i.e. Susie painting.) We then work to increase the descriptive words and build upon the sequence of the activity.

Our goal is to show students an array of 2-3 pictures, let the child choose one to talk about and record a language sample such as this (although it may be grammatically incorrect) : "I playing water table. I getting the crab a new home. Him like his new home because him it's big for him and him safe there."

The child who told us this story demonstrates his ability to label familiar objects and to use verbs with the "ing " ending. He also demonstrates that he understands the science concept that the crab moves to a new home because it outgrew the old one and for protection. His language sample further shows that we need to continue to work on proper pronoun usage and grammatically using helping verbs such as "am".

Digital photos act as a writing prompt or an idea prompt for young children. They spark many great conversations and opportunities to see what students have learned.