Among the journal requirements are quickwrites. For a quickwrite, I will give you a prompt and your job is to take 7 minutes to respond in a thoughtful way (usually these will happen at the beginning of class). Your responses are not meant to be blurbs in which you regurgitate something that you have read in the textbook, nor are they an attempt to prove how much you know, but instead, they are a time to record some genuine ideas or questions about the prompt. I will join you in writing a response based on the prompt. After 7 minutes I will generally request that someone share – either reading aloud what they actually wrote or sharing about how the writing process treated them.
Another required aspect of the journal will be your lab log. Details for the lab log will be given later.
You will also be required to keep a vocabulary list in your journal. Throughout a chapter (both textbook reading and lecture) you will be responsible for recording ALL vocabulary that is new to you. You will also be responsible for defining this vocabulary.
Occasionally, your journal will be used for other assignments, like reading logs and two column responses, the details of such assignments will be given at the time they are assigned.
Your journal also must have a table of contents -- in order for the table of contents to be possible, you must number all the pages in your journal. The only entries that you are required to have in your table of contents are your labs, other than that, how much or how little you list is up to you. I will suggest that having a detailed table of contents will make your Quarterly Journal Reflection, which is described in the next paragraph, easier.
At this point, I’m sure you are wondering, how will this be graded?
I will not read every page in your science journal. The reasons for this are many, including that I would never have time to read every page in all of your journals, but also because not everything you write in the journal will be a brilliant, dazzling observation that you feel like sharing with me. For that reason, at the end of every quarter you will be responsible for compiling a journal reflection. The journal reflection will give you some topics, for example: “Turn in an entry that exemplifies formulating genuine questions.” Then you will review your journal and find an entry that best meets this criteria. You will type up this entry and turn it in as a piece of your quarterly journal reflection. In addition to typed up pages, you will need to turn in your journal with the selected entries marked so I can refer back to the originals. Details for each Quarterly Journal Reflection will be given out a week before the end of the quarter.Whew! That’s a lot of information. Here’s the overview:
1) Buy a bound composition book with graph ruled pages.
2) Number all the pages.
3) Dedicate the first five pages to your Table of Contents.*
4) Count back twenty pages from the last page and label this your vocabulary section.*
* You may want to mark the end of the TOC and the beginning of the vocabulary with a sticky note tab so that you can easily flip to them.
What I really hope is that this journal becomes a personal thing. I’d like to see each person develop their own unique habits with it. Maybe you’ll begin marking important pages with sticky notes. Or flag different topics with different colored sticky notes. In my journal, I have section in the back for “Golden Lines”, quotes that I hear that I think are important and want to remember. I have other back sections for my book list and a “Don’t Forget” list. In order for you to make sense of your journal, I highly recommend that every entry has a date and a title. This will make it easier for you to find things later. But beyond this, the options are endless and up to you. Have fun! I hope you find this journal to be a useful tool.
No comments:
Post a Comment