In the previous module, we talked about how important daily writing is for reluctant writers students. We also talked about the importance of teachers modeling, and writing with their students. The daybook is a way to join these two activities. A daybook is like a journal, but it's not a journal. It's more than a journal. Physically, it's a notebook, but not a binder with sections where pages can easily be taken out or put in. It's an old-fashioned hardcover composition type notebook. You can't put pages in easily, or take them out. The pages stay put. This is important because the daybook is a collection. Lil Brannon describes it as like that drawer in the kitchen where we stick everything that does not yet have a place, but we know we might need some day. The daybook, Brannon says, is the place where students put all their thoughts throughout the day. The daybook serves as a collection place to keep everything, and we mean, everything. A daybook is a collection, it's a record of thoughts, progress, questions, thinking, influences, ideas. It's a way to collect one's thinking and to discover. Its essentially a collection of your writing life. Everything that has mattered to you, collected in words, and sometimes images and drawings as well, over that period of time. It's like a journal, but it's not a journal where you only keep your most cherished writing. It's not a three-ring binder, where you weed out things that don't match your expectations are immediate needs. It's a record of your thinking and your existing. Brannon writes, "Daybooks are a place for students to store all of their writings on the way to creating a final product." But they also keep in their daybooks, math problems, social studies questions, and their private thoughts about what happened at lunch. Daybooks are not just for writing, they integrate subjects. They are often messy and filled with incomplete pages. This helps students get over perfectionism, because writing is often messy, and mistakes are often crucial stepping stones to later successes. Brannon says your daybook will fill up with stuff you can't quite live without. A daybook is just stuff, the stuff of a child's day, the stuff that she will return to you as a reader, writer, and thinker. A daybook works in classrooms that are concerned with what and how children learn, and where teachers are curious about what and how children think. In order for daybooks to matter, Brannon concludes, "Teachers and students must come to terms with what it means to be a writer." Donald Murray says, "The notebook, which I call a daybook, will make it possible for you to use fragments of time, and fragments of time are all that most of us really have." Fifteen minutes, 10, 5, 2, 1, less. In this book, you can make lists, notes, diagrams, collect the quotes and citations, paste in key articles and references, sketch outlines, draft titles, leads, endings, key paragraphs that will make it possible for you to be ready to write when you have an hour or two or three, clear. What might you put it in a daybook? These are only some of the list: writing territories or ideas, drafts, snippets of conversation, images, magazine collages, quotes, comics, drawings, to-do lists, notes from all classes, glued in assignments, cards or Emails from friends, and whatever else is important to you. That's the thing about daybooks. It's not only that you get to write in them and draw in them, but you can also glue in them, or staple in them. You want to write something of your own, but you want to do it on the computer, print it out and glue the printed version into your daybook. Daybooks can help reluctant writers begin to think and act as writers, to grow use to collecting through words. Even if they write only a handful of words or add in a sketch and give it a two-word title, they will be increasing their fluency and changing the entire relationship they have to writing as a way of expressing themselves, and relating to their world. But it's not only students who can benefit from keeping daybooks. Teachers can benefit too. As a teacher, you're going to be a co-learner and writer with your students. You are the model for them in the classroom. The reasons to keep your own daybook are numerous. A daybook will help you increase your writing fluency. By writing every day, your writing amount will naturally increase. It will provide a place and a system for developing your daily writing practice. We want our students, especially our reluctant writers, to develop a writing habit, and so we must develop one too. In doing so, we understand their struggles and model the writing process. The daybook will help you organize your writing and acknowledge its power. Keeping a daybook can highlight the power and richness of a writing life. You'll learn more about daybooks in the next couple of readings.
