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Notebook Connections: Strategies for the Reader's Notebook
"The question I grappled with was how to move students from "couch-potato" readers who can answer basic questions with one word"-"to readers who think while reading"-"to readers who think beyond their reading." -Aimee Buckner In "Notebook Know-How," Aimee Buckner demonstrated the power of notebooks to spark and capture students' ideas in the writing workshop. In "Notebook Connections," she turns her focus to the reading workshop, showing how to transform those "couch-potato" readers into deep thinkers. Buckner's fourth-grade students use reader's notebooks as a place to document their thinking and growth, to support their thinking for group discussions, and to explore their own ideas about a text without every entry being judged as evidence of their reading progress. Buckner describes her model as flexible enough for students to respond in a variety of ways yet structured enough to provide explicit instruction. "Notebook Connections" leads teachers through the process of launching, developing, and fine-tuning a reader's notebook program. Teacher-guided lessons in every chapter help students create anchor texts for their notebooks using various comprehension and writing strategies. As students become more proficient, they grow more independent in their thinking and responses and will begin to select the strategies that work best for them. In the process, the notebook becomes a bridge that helps students make connections between ideas, texts, strategies, and their work as readers and writers. "Notebook Connections, "filled with lesson ideas and assessment tips, provides a comprehensive model for making reader's notebooks the centerpiece of your reading workshop.
152 pages, ebook
First published March 28, 2009
32 people are currently reading
264 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
July 10, 2017
...even better second time around...
January 7, 2016
Writing about reading is hard for me, so I can imagine kids having difficulty with it.
Aimee Buckner lays the information out in a way that seems sequential and makes sense to my mind. This was a very helpful read, and one that I am eager to put in place.
Aimee Buckner lays the information out in a way that seems sequential and makes sense to my mind. This was a very helpful read, and one that I am eager to put in place.
July 16, 2009
Like Aimee Buckner, I have often been frustrated with the poor quality of my students' reading response entries. Aimee provides practical solutions for teaching students how to respond and provides rubrics, lesson plan ideas, and reflections to use with students.
I do not always agree with her approach, for example, I do not grade students' grammar, spelling, etc. when assessing response entries (perhaps I should). I will need to tweak some of her ideas to make them work with my philosophy about teaching reading, but isn't this what all teachers do? Take someone else's kernel of an idea and make it our own? Thanks, Aimee, for the kernels...
I do not always agree with her approach, for example, I do not grade students' grammar, spelling, etc. when assessing response entries (perhaps I should). I will need to tweak some of her ideas to make them work with my philosophy about teaching reading, but isn't this what all teachers do? Take someone else's kernel of an idea and make it our own? Thanks, Aimee, for the kernels...
September 4, 2010
This has been a wonderful "serious" read this summer. I worked on some of her strategies personally in my own "beginning" notebook, and it really opened my eyes to some of my own beliefs about reading.
She has constructed an interesting approach to specifically getting students to write about their comprehension/what their thinking about as they read.
Although written for older students, I am excited to dabble with some of these ideas with my younger students.
She has constructed an interesting approach to specifically getting students to write about their comprehension/what their thinking about as they read.
Although written for older students, I am excited to dabble with some of these ideas with my younger students.
March 19, 2011
Quite similar to Buckner's Notebook Know-How: Strategies For The Writer's Notebook but with more focus on reading strategies such as Leaning In, Fab Five, History of a Reader, What I Know to Be True about Reading, and Character Connections. A fairly quick read with lots of student examples to add depth to her descriptions.
August 14, 2018
I'm so grateful Jennifer Saravallo recommended this book at ILA. It is a gem. It has helped me really understand how to maximize readers notebooks in my classroom. The strategy lessons are strong and innovative. I can't wait to try a few! I also love how she connects the strategies to writing. I got so much from this book I ordered her other two books!
January 14, 2021
The purpose and use of reader's notebook has always been less clear than that of the writer's notebook... until now! I'm very glad I read Notebook Connections back-to-back with Notebook Know-How - many of the teaching strategies apply to both, but are used in different ways. I feel inspired and full of knowledge to take into my classroom this year.
April 20, 2020
I am truly enjoying this book. Any new teacher and then the veteran teacher should give this a read. It talks about was the enhance your classroom and what would make it better with a reader's notebook. She has so many great ideas to enhance their reading and make them enjoy what they read.
April 2, 2021
Problem is that the Aimees (teachers who genuinely love to read and write) and far outnumbered by non-Aimees (teaches who do not genuinely love to read and write). Say an ELA curriculum requires a non-Aimee to use reading notebooks in their classroom. Do the students actually gain anything?
March 15, 2018
Great resource. Full of valuable insight and practical applications.
June 19, 2018
A quick read for many good little tips for readers’ notebooks. This book is definitely geared toward upper elementary or middle school, but there is still a lot to adapt for the high school teachers!
March 8, 2022
This had a lot of good ideas not just about Reader's Notebooks, but on teaching ELA as well.
February 6, 2011
Where her first book Notebook Know-How centered on the writer’s notebook, Buckner shifts her attention to the reader’s notebook, and how reading like a writer, and writing about that heightens both student interest and learning. In essence, all the mini-lessons and strategies she outlines reinforce the old adage of reading like a writer, and even its inverse, writing like a reader.
Although I’m personally a huge fan of her philosophy and pedagogy – in an ideal classroom, that is – I am wary of the overambitious and all-too-broad mini-lessons. Some may call it a whole language approach, which I believe does not adequately serve lower socio-economic and English language learners as effectively as intended and implemented per se. That is, the students she works with here are predominantly middle-class white kids in suburban Georgia. Not only is this a little acknowledged bias on her part, but also on the part of the publisher and the districts who buy this kind of book to give schools like mine, who serves lower-income Hispanic, black, white, and Asian Americans. As much as I love the kind of thinking that she details in this remarkable concise professional development tool, I have serious reservations. Do these exact strategies, as delivered as open-ended as she writes them, serve my students best? Case in point: The dearth of explicit vocabulary and grammar instruction does not address or lessen the vocabulary gap between my students and hers; which I would argue is necessary in order to help my students be on par with hers. That is, the best well-crafted strategy lessens can fall on deaf ears if they don’t have the academic vocabulary in the first place to understand what you’re talking about. In short, I would argue that my time and efforts are better spent reading tried-and-true pedagogy that addressees the very different needs to English language learners and those entering in our public school system whose vocabularies are significantly truncated the moment the walk in the Kindergarten door on day one of their K-12 education.
However, there are some gems that are useful here in these pages which transcend the socio-economic backgrounds of our nation’s students. One such is her Fab Five Summaries, which is singularly the best of its kind I’ve every come across. (And most teachers would readily admit that summaries are often the most monstrous of beasts that can turn kids into regurgitation machine with ten too many superfluous details, and which often don’t make much sense.)
And then there is her reprinting of Brian Cambourne’s Conditions of Learning – a theoretical model that combines many truisms that any teacher would agree with. However, I do have reservations in regards to how his conditions – all of which I agree with in theory – are limited by students’ socio-economic background. That is, the notions of expectations, responsibility, employment, and approximation can and are used in schools, but can be absent in their lives outside school; which in turn thwarts the best and well-intentioned efforts of teachers who serve lower socio-economic students, particularly if the latter come from generational (versus situational) poverty. What works in a school setting can looks completely useless for life at large for our hardest to reach kids, as their world does not operate by the same rules, assumptions, means, and ends.
Fortunately, Buckner’s book is an easy and enjoyable read, and its limitations do not detract from the genuinely high-quality and higher-thinking strategies that she effectively details with examples from real students and their work. Skip that enormous Fountas & Pinnell tome, Guiding Readers and Writers, and spend an afternoon (as opposed to many months) reading this. Trust me: You will get more bang for your buck -- and time.
Although I’m personally a huge fan of her philosophy and pedagogy – in an ideal classroom, that is – I am wary of the overambitious and all-too-broad mini-lessons. Some may call it a whole language approach, which I believe does not adequately serve lower socio-economic and English language learners as effectively as intended and implemented per se. That is, the students she works with here are predominantly middle-class white kids in suburban Georgia. Not only is this a little acknowledged bias on her part, but also on the part of the publisher and the districts who buy this kind of book to give schools like mine, who serves lower-income Hispanic, black, white, and Asian Americans. As much as I love the kind of thinking that she details in this remarkable concise professional development tool, I have serious reservations. Do these exact strategies, as delivered as open-ended as she writes them, serve my students best? Case in point: The dearth of explicit vocabulary and grammar instruction does not address or lessen the vocabulary gap between my students and hers; which I would argue is necessary in order to help my students be on par with hers. That is, the best well-crafted strategy lessens can fall on deaf ears if they don’t have the academic vocabulary in the first place to understand what you’re talking about. In short, I would argue that my time and efforts are better spent reading tried-and-true pedagogy that addressees the very different needs to English language learners and those entering in our public school system whose vocabularies are significantly truncated the moment the walk in the Kindergarten door on day one of their K-12 education.
However, there are some gems that are useful here in these pages which transcend the socio-economic backgrounds of our nation’s students. One such is her Fab Five Summaries, which is singularly the best of its kind I’ve every come across. (And most teachers would readily admit that summaries are often the most monstrous of beasts that can turn kids into regurgitation machine with ten too many superfluous details, and which often don’t make much sense.)
And then there is her reprinting of Brian Cambourne’s Conditions of Learning – a theoretical model that combines many truisms that any teacher would agree with. However, I do have reservations in regards to how his conditions – all of which I agree with in theory – are limited by students’ socio-economic background. That is, the notions of expectations, responsibility, employment, and approximation can and are used in schools, but can be absent in their lives outside school; which in turn thwarts the best and well-intentioned efforts of teachers who serve lower socio-economic students, particularly if the latter come from generational (versus situational) poverty. What works in a school setting can looks completely useless for life at large for our hardest to reach kids, as their world does not operate by the same rules, assumptions, means, and ends.
Fortunately, Buckner’s book is an easy and enjoyable read, and its limitations do not detract from the genuinely high-quality and higher-thinking strategies that she effectively details with examples from real students and their work. Skip that enormous Fountas & Pinnell tome, Guiding Readers and Writers, and spend an afternoon (as opposed to many months) reading this. Trust me: You will get more bang for your buck -- and time.
November 21, 2010
I picked up this book for two reasons. One: I am doing interactive notebooks with my English 1 Support students and I thought it would give me good ideas. Two: it's about the "reader's notebook," which was something I wasn't familiar with.
All in all, I wasn't disappointed with the book. The writers give clear reasons for why they developed certain strategies, how to do it (including a mini-script, in some cases), and goals and procedures. Often, there are student examples, too. I haven't gotten a chance to implement anything in this book - I think it's going to take some planning over the summer to translate them to lesson plans with handouts, useful scaffolding, and a better concept of evaluation - but I look forward to that. Truly a smart book, especially for those teachers who spend more time teaching reading than writing.
All in all, I wasn't disappointed with the book. The writers give clear reasons for why they developed certain strategies, how to do it (including a mini-script, in some cases), and goals and procedures. Often, there are student examples, too. I haven't gotten a chance to implement anything in this book - I think it's going to take some planning over the summer to translate them to lesson plans with handouts, useful scaffolding, and a better concept of evaluation - but I look forward to that. Truly a smart book, especially for those teachers who spend more time teaching reading than writing.
August 5, 2012
A quick read with practical extended response teaching ideas for the reader's notebook that will help intermediate teachers assess the level of understanding and frequency of use of comprehension strategies with their students. However, this book mostly focuses on fiction. Even though the author states in the beginning of the book that her suggestions extend to all genres, most do not extend to non-fiction.
I liked how the author referred to how her work with reader's notebooks pairs nicely with The Comprehension Toolkit by Harvey & Goudvis and how she took ideas from Kelly Gallagher's book Deeper Reading and adjusted the ideas to specifically work with grades 3-5. Overall, this is a great resource for teachers wanting their reading instruction to move from isolated skills and strategies to a more holistic approach.
I liked how the author referred to how her work with reader's notebooks pairs nicely with The Comprehension Toolkit by Harvey & Goudvis and how she took ideas from Kelly Gallagher's book Deeper Reading and adjusted the ideas to specifically work with grades 3-5. Overall, this is a great resource for teachers wanting their reading instruction to move from isolated skills and strategies to a more holistic approach.
October 12, 2010
I know this will get me tarred and feathered but I really think homeschooling parents should be required to take continuing education credits just like real teachers. I'm not sure how I'd finance this requirement but I am certainly missing out on all the new and improved strategies in education (of course, on the flip side, I'm also missing out on all the here today-gone tomorrow strategies as well). I am so motivated by the idea of the reader's notebook. Although I felt like the author could have organized her book better, I've picked out the ideas and rearranged them to fit us. We've implemented this strategy in our home and already I see greater story understanding and appreciation. My next goal: writer's notebook. Thanks, Kym!
June 3, 2010
Several of Aimee's "strategies" or activities that she illustrates in the book look fantastic. I think they would be useful. This book wasn't exactly what I was looking for, however. Although I recognize and embrace the reading-writing connection, this book was really more about the writing than the reading. I was looking for guidance in using reading notebooks in the classroom to help with assessment (formal and informal) during reader's workshop. Although Aimee does talk about assessment and provide some rubrics, I found it lacking in the read "how to" when it comes to connecting with reading strategy instruction and reflection.
July 25, 2009
Although I loved Aimee Buckner's Notebook Connections for the Writer's Notebook, I was truly disappointed with her recent release for the Reader's Notebook. It seems she is a writer at heart and fails to focus her new book solely on reading, much of the book slides into suggestions for the Writer's Notebook.
August 17, 2009
I am gravely disappointed by this resource, after hearing so many good things about this teacher/author. There is nothing new here! There is an artificial tang throughout. She did not help me connect reading and writing notebooks in any way other than I would have done it before picking up this book.
August 19, 2010
Pretty much every Aimee Buckner book is great. She gives real, applicable ways to use notebooks in class. So many professional literature books utilize theory, and give you very little applicable, relevant material. Buckner's books are not like that. She is very user friendly, and very readable.
August 23, 2010
I got some good ideas from this book, some that I really liked and some that I would definitely have to tweak to make work for me.
Some of her points, I don't completely agree with, but overall this was a quick read to give me some new ideas for how to make the readers' notebook work in my classroom.
Some of her points, I don't completely agree with, but overall this was a quick read to give me some new ideas for how to make the readers' notebook work in my classroom.
August 31, 2011
I got quite a bit our of this book, including "What I Know To Be True About Reading," a concept I found myself expanding upon. Younger students might have trouble with Buckner's 2 notebooks, one for writing thoughts and one for reading thoughts. I especially liked her lesson/information about summarize versus retell. A worthy book for teaching professionals.
September 27, 2011
Aimee Buckner's books are great, and this is no exception. I especially like how she balances the descriptions of the WHAT and the WHY in her texts. In this book, Buckner takes the writer's notebook into the reading/literature classroom. I love books that make the reading/writing connections explicit.
November 27, 2012
Good ideas for launching a reader's notebook - strategies that teachers can also use as models in their own reader's notebooks. Assessment is always tricky in reading workshop, but Buckner provides some practical ideas ranging from student reflection to developing rubrics. Good practical resource filled with student examples.
July 12, 2013
Good start, but then it seemed to focus more on writing than reading. I know they're linked, but it just felt like Buckner fell back onto writing more about her personal strength (teaching writing). I was hoping there would be more focus on pulling literary elements into the reader's notebook. Still good overall.
February 23, 2014
Aimee Buckner has written a practical and inspirational guide for using reader's notebooks. She has included many easy-to-implement mini-lessons as well as a section on assessments. This is a must-have for any teacher who wants to have students using a reader's notebook in a purposeful way that deepens understanding of reading strategies.
July 2, 2015
The strategies were clearly described and organized. Although I felt the earlier book, Notebook Know-How, had more a-ha moments for me, I do think this book has valuable ideas to offer. I'm not sure these are strategies I will lift out and use exactly as described, but I did find myself inspired to write notes to plan for my students based on passages in this book.
August 11, 2009
While geared more toward teachers of upper elementary/middle school. There were some bits that were applicable to the younger group. It definitely gave me things to think about in regards to my 1st graders.
June 12, 2010
Focused on pulling writing ideas from reading material, this book is a great resource for the middle school teacher using writers workshop. The ideas are based in sound theory, and look like they'd be engaging for the students as well.
June 17, 2011
Some great ideas for rubrics I hope to use for assessing my student's reading notebooks. Also has some great lesson ideas. Having taught for a few years now I didn't find many new ideas in the book, but it included some good examples and new spins on lessons I'd like to use.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews