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Daybooks

• What are they?
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Literacy Leads

Discovering daybooks

The daybook is just a blank book of any sort, usually costing no more than a couple dollars at most. It differs from a journal in that students decide what to write in it and how to organize it. On their way to creating a final product, students need this place to hold onto the thoughts and notes they discover throughout the process. It’s not just for writing, but also for integrating all subjects. The thread that ties all the information students learn in a day together is the thinking the students record in their daybooks. Students become more logical, improve their writing skills and reading comprehension through writing about everything.

A skeptic, I tried daybooks out for myself at first. I was reluctant to keep anything other than a loose-leaf notebook when a friend in the UNC Charlotte Writing Project handed me a hardcover composition notebook almost a decade ago. I was a 3-ring notebook kind of girl. Ripping out pages, moving pages around, and adding hole-punched papers to my own worked for me. I liked writing on a thick stack of lined paper with just the right pen. Wadding up papers and arching them in the garbage can like I’d seen writers do on television helped me do my best work. At the time, I was not writing for myself either. I was completing only assigned writing.

As I began to write for me, I discovered I enjoyed the smallness of the notebook and how it fit in my purse. It traveled with me easily. Having it with me helped me jot down ideas as they occurred to me. As I experimented with my new daybook, I felt the freedom of not worrying about mistakes, not crossing out ideas nor throwing away pages. Formerly, when using notebook paper, I tossed away ideas that could actually have become a part of other writings some day. I tried writing in different colors, in the margins and sideways. After all, it was my notebook and I wasn’t showing it to anyone.

Evolution

When I started my second daybook, I decided I needed a Table of Contents to index the pages. I began to value the Table of Contents because I could more easily revisit my ideas. To do so, I had to number the pages and I did, in the upper corners. Locating what I needed by flipping the pages with my thumb was easy if the pages were numbered and catalogued.

Thoughts came to me while watching television, riding in the car and at school, eating breakfast or brushing my teeth. My ideas didn’t get lost any more because my daybook was close at hand. On the rare occasion when I left it at home or at school, I felt uncomfortable. I learned to write on scraps of paper and then glue them onto the pages when my daybook and I were reunited. When I thought of a story idea, I began turning to the last page because I could locate it quickly. The last page became my topic list.

I began inventing solutions to my writing problems. I labeled ideas I wanted to come back to with quickly drawn clouds that I could spot as I flipped through the pages of my daybook. I couldn’t figure out how to balance handouts and my daybook at the same time. My solution was to fold the page in half, run a glue stick down both sides of the folded edge, and then stuff the fold of the paper inside my notebook. I closed my daybook and pressed on the binding. The handout stuck so well, I could pick up my daybook by holding the glued-in sheet. My daybook grew fat.

Sharing what I had learned

Once I’d seen how much I’d grown as a writer by using a daybook, I decided to teach my elementary students how to use one.

I realized that since daybooks are difficult to explain, they would require some introduction. I wanted to balance structure to make them work as a thinking tool but also ownership to make students want to use them. I tweaked my plan over the course of using daybooks with elementary children mostly, but also high school students and teachers for 10 years. I offer my plan with the understanding that I continue to change my approach with every new group of students and as my understanding of the learning process grows.

NEXT: Daybooks - A powerful learning tool