Querida Sra. Grover: Reading Dialogue Journals

For my Masters thesis, I chose to study the use of dialogue journals with my second grade bilingual students.  Over the course of 90 days, I analyzed and charted features included in my students' responses to their reading during self-selected reading time.  Our typical reading workshop routine was a 10-20 minute minilesson and then students would have self-selected reading for 30 minutes.  During this time, I pulled small groups for guided reading.  At the 30 minute mark, I would ring a bell and students would grab their dialogue journals and have 10-15 minutes to write me  letter about what they were reading.  I tried to encourage them to show me evidence of the strategies that we were learning during the minilessons.

These are some examples of the journals when we first started in October.




























































































My journals were never as fabulous as those you see in Fountas and Pinnell's Guiding Readers and Writers (I LOVE that book!) but I did learn so much about my students from them.  I promised that I would write back at least once a week.

What I learned from the quantitative part of my study was that the students that were most impacted by these journals were my middle guys.  Not the highest students.  Not the struggling ones.  It was the middle ones that are often neglected or overlooked.  These were the ones that showed the most improvement over the course of the study.

These examples were from 2005 and I have learned a lot since then.  In the future, I would definitely include language frames to help students understand the differences in types of language used when describing characters versus summarizing, etc.

Dialogue journals will forever be a part of my classroom practice.  They are windows to the souls of my little readers.  So...as you think of what to do with all of those spiral notebooks that will be heading your way in two months, maybe you will want to reserve one of them for a reading dialogue journal!