The How and Why of Reading Response Journals (2024)

Simply put, a Reading Response Journal is a place for students to write, draw, and share their opinions, ideas, or respond to text we have read in class. There’s nothing fancy about these. They are just cheapy spiral notebooks I buy at BTS time for like 15 cents each.

Then, we make a cover and keep them in our desks. You can grab the cover I use for FREE right here.

But let me set you straight on one thing about our Reading Response Journals…They are NOT an Interactive Notebook

Let me repeat that…

How Does it Fit into my Routine?

Well, that is the best part of a Reading Response Journal… it’s a chameleon of journals. We use it for quick writes on a specific topic, or as a place to share our learning from particular unit. But most importantly, it is the place where we WRITE ABOUT TEXT. We use them before reading, during reading, and after reading. We also use them during center time, and sometimes we even use them during Science and Social Studies!

Reading and writing go hand in hand. We expect our students to absorb so much from the text that they are exposed to yet, we rarely give them time to process, sort, or “think through” what they’ve read in a non threatening way. Reading Response Journals bridge the gap between reading a text and writing to the text in a logical and easy way.

Note Taking

Since one of our main purposes of this journal is to interact with text, I love using it to keep notes of passages or books we’ve read. Here, we took notes on how animals clean themselves based on a book we had read.

Later, we used the chart to compare two of the animals.

As a Reference

I love using our Reading Response Journals as an easy place to make reference sheet for new skills we’re learning!

Here, we were learning about the suffixes -less and -ful. After discussing these two common word parts, we made a quick reference page for when/how to use them and even did some practice!

Here’s another reference sheet we had made for adding -er and -est to words.

Other Content Areas

I LOVE integrating Science and Social Studies into our literature block. It just brings the learning alive! So sometimes our RRJ are used to write about different processes we’ve learned about.

We wrote about why the seasons change during our study of Fall.

During our Moon and Space study, we used our newfound understanding of the moon to write about how the Moon and Earth are different.

We even took some notes on the Constitution after learning more about it on Constitution Day.

How to Grade Reading Response Journals

You know I am the queen of easy. When it comes to grading, I follow the “less is more” mentality. (You can read more about that here)

I’m sure most teachers would say, “Oh I collect their notebooks every week to check and correct every single page we’ve done..” And you know what? Maybe you are that teacher and all I have to say is: ” good for you!” But for me, the LAST thing I need is another thing to grade or collect!

That’s why checking my student’s Reading Response Journals is always done on the fly. If I am spot-checking their work, I’ll usually just put a star on the page that says, “hey- I saw this”.

If I’m looking for something in particular, as students finish their writings, I’ll go around and check what they’ve written.

Here we had documented how Officer Buckle reacts to different events in the story, “Officer Buckle and Gloria”. A check plus means they’ve got it!

As I check over student’s work, I can easily see who’s met the objective and who still needs coaching. This allows me to reteach and provide immediate feedback as needed. No need to lug home tons of notebooks for review.

Ain’t nobody got time for dat!

I also use the information I can gather from their responses to form my small group lessons later in the week. The class struggled with finding the main idea of a paragraph? Looks like I can cover that in my small group.

Reading Response Journals Done for You!

Want to press the easy button on Reading Response Journals in your classroom? Check out this amazing bundle full of 202 Reading Response Journal Prompts, perfect for implementing this comprehension-building routine in your classroom.

So, those are the ins and outs of my FAVORITE routine. Do you have your students keep a Reading Response Journal? If so, please tell me what you have them write!

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