Writing About Reading: Stop N Jots, Literacy Letters, and Summaries

There are 3 main types of writing about our reading happening right now: Stop N Jots; Literacy Letters; and Summaries. Stop N Jots happen at home and at school. Summaries are written once a month and literacy letters are written three times a month. Every Friday, students have time during Writing Workshop to write a summary or literacy letter. That does not mean they finish them however and this could mean "weekend" writing homework. More on each item below... Students learning English are not expected to do this work at home. They are still doing this work in class with a teacher guiding them. 

Stop N Jots

Stop N Jots happen every day at school and at home. Students should not have a post it note on every page of their book. When a deep idea comes into a reader's mind, they must identify the "text clue" that is leading to this idea. Write it down on the post it note with the page number of the book in quotes. Then, write down the reader's idea. Then, identify, what reading strategy was used to link the text with the idea and write that code at the top of the post it. INF, P, Q, T-T, T-W, ACTIONS, HEART and the like are some of the codes.  

Parents, this is a meta-cognitive reading strategy and the reason why students from Finland score the highest on the PISA test in reading. Meta cognitive reading is crucial to true comprehension and growth. 

Summaries

Students have gone through the steps for writing a summary in class and they all have a teacher/student written summary on their blog. This is their model for independent work. All summaries must get to the HEART of the story. Again, students building English speaking skills are writing summaries with a teacher in a guided setting. 

• Step 1: summary star graphic organizer. 
• Step 2: cloze summary writing sheet. 
• Step 3: type and share with teacher. 
• Step 4: revise and edit with teacher, parent, peer. 
• Step 5: publish on blog. 

Checklist for Literacy Letters

• ___I put the date, a greeting, and a closing in my letter.
• ___I wrote in paragraphs.
• ___I checked my work for spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.  
• ___I wrote legibly.
• ___I included the information that was asked for in the assignment.


• Paragraph one is a sentence with the title, the level, the genre and the page number that you are currently at. Then, you tell me a bit about how your reading is going. Why do you like this book? How is the level feeling? Do you want to abandon this book or finish it? Do you want to write a summary about the book so that your classmates will read it?
• Paragraph 2 is an expanded Stop N Jot. You could make a text connection, you could infer for the HEART/THEME of the story, which is the author's purpose of writing this book. 
• Paragraph 3 is another expanded Stop N Jot. Perhaps you want to build some theories about your main character or one of the sub-characters. You might want to write your BIG IDEAS down with text details about why you've built these Big Ideas or Theories.
• Paragraph 4 is a final Stop N Jot. Maybe make a Prediction about what will happen next in your story. 


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