Weekly Learning Logs: Take 2

The children are not understanding the point of the learning log. 

1. There is a great deal of confusion about which class they are supposed to be writing about. I cannot figure this one out. You are in English class; write about English class. When you are in science, write about science. 
2. I keep hearing, "But we didn't learn anything this week." Are you kidding me? I am the hardest working teacher I know, and we didn't learn anything? This week, we worked on vocabulary strategies, identifying Contrasts & Contradictions, making predictions, and explaining what we have learned using complete sentences. Yep, nothing. 
3. The kids want a sentence limit. I keep telling them to write enough to tell me what they learned. Next time, I am going to say, with an echo, "One hundred sentences sentences sentences." 

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I am willing to learn from my knuckleheads, even if they think they are learning nothing from me. So I am going to make some changes for week three. 

I talked to a couple of science teachers about how they are using the learning log. I was told that they are giving the students a specific question about the material covered during the week, then they follow the same rubric that I established. (One teacher did ask why I had not added spelling. I responded that there is only so much we can focus on at one time, and I had to pick and choose my battles on this one.)

The next time we do the learning log, I am going to give some more structure. As I am writing this, I realized that I actually gave my students to focused questions regarding what they had learned from our reading of The Giver, then I asked them to complete the learning log a day later. I really gave the same assignment twice. Since their answers to the following questions were more specific, I will use this format as the learning log the next time we complete this assignment. In addition to the one hundred sentences sentences sentences, of course. 

This assignment focused on the Contrasts & Contradictions that we had
discussed throughout chapter 1.

This one focused on our vocabulary routine for the week.