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Journey
North Journals
Helping
Young Minds Grow
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Overview:
This teachers' lesson offers tips on using Journey North journals to
inspire learning and assessment.
Background
Many Journey North teachers have students use journals
throughout the season. When students use journals to capture and reflect on
observations, experiences, and data — and put forth opinions, predictions,
and theories — learning blossoms. Journals can also be great assessment
tools because they offer you and your students windows into their thinking,
understanding, and knowledge gaps. Finally, they can help you address pressures
to integrate writing into subject areas.
Planning
for Using Journals
How you use
Journey North journals, and which type you use, will depend in part on
your teaching and learning goals and on students' abilities. Here are some
questions to ask yourself (and, perhaps, the students):
- What
do we want to capture in the journals? (Everything we discover about
a species? Our daily observations, predictions, and explanations?)
Should each one have a theme (e.g., habitat, seasonal changes,
or spring monarch migration)?
- Do we
want the content be open-ended, more directed, or some of both?
- Which
of the following will we reflect on and respond to?: Journey North
News Updates, Journal Questions*,
our own questions and observations?
- Will
we include data and observation sheets from
Journey North Lessons?
- Will
we include seasonal and migration maps for
tracking changes and making comparisons?
- How
will we use the journals for assessment?
What kinds of questions will help us see how we've grown?
*Journal
questions from Journey North
For
each migration and seasonal project, Journey North provides Journal
Questions in regular News Updates and on many Activity/Lesson
pages. These
questions, which can also be used to spark discussions, help students
build and reinforce reasoning skills and understanding by asking them
to do the following:
- try to
make sense of data
- puzzle
out math, science, or mapping challenges
- reflect
on Journey North experiences
- think
creatively or make personal connections to material
- apply
their experiences and learning to new contexts
Most questions
model the thinking process that scientists use, so students can begin
to think and act like scientists.
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