Reading Journal Prompts

Aligning Questions with Key Strategies

I hate giving kids prompts for their reading journals. In my ideal reading world, kids would spontaneously compose entries of such quality and variety that using prompts would seem silly. However, the reading world is far from ideal, and I’ve discovered a way to use journal prompts to introduce kids to valuable reading strategies and useful ways of reflecting on their books.

While I don’t like the idea of constraining readers’ responses to narrowly defined topics, I do want them to apply important reading strategies and note the results. So I’ve been experimenting with the idea of creating journal prompt questions for specific reading techniques that I know I’ll be teaching lessons on. After teaching a particular lesson, I can tell the kids that I want them to respond to a particular prompt sometime during that period. I can also use the prompt question during conferencing. Aligning the prompt with my lesson and my conferencing makes the exercise seem more purposeful to student. It also increases the quality and quantity of the responses I get.

As I do this more and get better at it, I find that I can come up with at least one key question for any concept we cover. Here are some of the questions I use most frequently and the strategies or concepts I pair them with:

• Questioning. What do you wonder about? Questioning is my favorite strategy to teach and it’s the one I start with first. But it’s not something most young readers are used to. I want readers to get into the habit of questioning everything they can: the meaning of a word, the name of a character, why a character does one thing and not another, etc. Questions are the best way to open kids up to new possibilities in their reading.

• Inference. What do you know that the author hasn’t told you? Many young readers find inference baffling. But I like to point out that they do it all the time. After reading even just a few pages, readers seem to know things authors haven’t mentioned. If we can write those things down, and connect them with words we’ve read, more often than not we’ll have a valid inference.

• Predicting. What do you think is going to happen? I used to ask kids, “What do you think is going to happen next?” But I realized that by leaving off the last word, I could get a more interesting range of responses. “What do you think is going to happen next?” focuses readers exclusively on the most immediate action. By taking off the last word, I can get kids to speculate about any future outcome in a story. I can also get kids to think about other types of outcomes in non-fiction writing such as which way an argument is going to turn out.

• Connecting. What are you reminded of? Kids think they don’t connect to what they read but almost everything they come across reminds them of something. What I’m most interested in is how what they’re reminded of compares to what they read, and how this comparison shapes their reading experience. The classic book-versus-movie discussion is a good example.

• Visualizing. What can you see like a picture in your mind? Have you ever had kids close their eyes and describe a main character or a particular setting? What’s fascinating to me is the degree of detail kids can evoke, and how much of that detail isn’t in the text. To the extent that our minds create logical elements that aren’t explicitly defined, visualization is another form of inference. A reader’s visual experience of a text is often different than the text itself. What I want to understand is the logic of how a reader’s inferential thinking brings additional elements to mind.

• Determining Importance. What’s the one most important thing the writer wants you to know? This is my cue for kids to think about the main idea. I ask them to state their response as a single complete sentence. I also ask them to think about something that is both important to them and, in their opinion, important to the author as well. They can reflect on the text as a whole or only on the part they are reading at the time.

• Beginnings. What caught your attention and made you want to read more? Writers often put more effort into the beginning of something than they do into any other part. So I like kids to put effort into appreciating beginnings. Beginnings of individual chapters are interesting, too, so there are many opportunities to think about this.

• Endings. What were you left thinking about? Most kids think endings just end things. But the best endings often get the reader thinking about something else. And that “something else” is exactly what I’d like to see written in a reading journal. Over time, I hope to get readers in the habit of reflecting just a little after something ends instead of just rushing off to the next chapter or the next book.

• Word Choice. What interesting words or phrases can you remember? I used to think that kids never remembered specific bits of language from the books they read. But then I realized I never asked them. Initially, kids claim to draw a blank. But if I pose this question after showing them some examples from my own reading, they can usually come up with something good during the next reading session.

• Characters. Who is this person? This is an intentionally wide open question. I often model it by writing something like, “Holden Caulfield is a person who [is, has, does, wants, etc.]...” and creating a list of statements representing my analysis. Anything works as long as kids can tie it back to the text in a logical way. The best thing about such an open-ended question is that I tend to get a mix of literal and inferential detail.

In addition to knowing what readers think about these questions, I also want to know why they think it, and how they know they’re right by referring to something specific from the text. This gives us an opportunity to practice rendering our responses in the form of the “What-Why-How” strategy. I don’t often make kids use a What-Why-How chart, but I like them to know that the most effective responses use that structure.

Most successful responses run about a paragraph in length. But occasionally, kids will go farther. When they do, I know we’ve come across something that matters to them. These are the responses that often become the basis for reviews, essays, and talks.

The more I play with the idea of aligning a question with each strategy, technique, or concept I teach, the more valuable I find it to be. It’s great to end a lesson with a reading response question kids can dig into right away. Instead of becoming a formulaic approach to making kids respond in certain narrow ways, “the big question”, as I’ve come to call it, has become the perfect tool for focusing my lessons and making sure I get a specific assessable result. Rather than prompts, I see these questions as tools that keep me and the readers I work with focused on important instructional goals.

Comments

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