Double-Entry Diaries!!

So I loved keeping a diary as a little girl. . .actually, I still kind of keep one.  I feel like it helps me to better remember precious moments in my life when I write how I feel about them.  So why not take this idea into the classroom?

As I have been walking through a 4th grade piratical unit in my upper-elementary grades reading course, I have discovered so many educational classroom approaches that children love.  I know this is true for this piratical unit because it has been tested!  A variety of 4th grade classes at Hardin Park Elementary in Boone, NC have worked through this unit over a period of time, and the feedback along with the learning experiences of these children have been positive!

A double-entry diary (DED) is a way for students to reflect on information found in books, magazines, websites, journals, etc.  In one column, students record information they find within their text, and in the second column, they write about how it makes them feel, or what they think the information means.  In this way, students retain information better because they are able to write it down, along with their opinions and inferences about it, thus making the information more meaningful to them. The idea for using a DED in this piratical unit is for students to collect important information about pirates by reading the following books: What If You Met a Pirate? (Jan Adkins) and Pirate Diary-The Journal of Jake Carpenter (Richard Platt).

I really enjoyed reading the first book (What If You Met a Pirate?).  It was so much more interesting than reading a boring text book.  This book had beautiful illustrations, labels pointing to pirate gear and accessories, maps, and timelines!  It was very interesting and meaningful to me as I read through it!  The second book (Pirate Diary-The Journal of Jake Carpenter) was awesome too!  It gave a pirate’s perspective of being at sea and living day to day as a pirate through a diary-type of text.  When children view this, they will already be thinking about diaries and how they are written.  This should help in introducing the DED idea to students and they WILL benefit from this type of research!  If you would like to read more on DEDs and how it was implemented in the 4th grade classes, please click here, and read this article for yourself!

Yo Ho Ho!

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