If you read my post a few weeks ago about “Fluency Friday,” you know how much I LOVE routines in my room. Friday is a very routine day in Room 607. I always joke that if anything ever happened to me and I didn’t show up for school on a Friday, my kiddos could run the room themselves! Routines make planning so much easier and it helps the kiddos too when they know what to expect.
Here is another Friday routine in my room. It is a little something that I call “Home Journals.”
Every Friday, my kiddos write a friendly letter to someone at home in their “Home Journal.” We brainstorm as a class the things that we have done at school during the week. Their letter is required to be about school and it is a great way to communicate with their parents about what they are learning each week. We then have a quick mini-lesson for writing. Some weeks it is on organization, sometimes it is on writing good detail sentences, word choice, conventions, etc….
Then, off they go. It is a great way to get friendly letter writing done in an authentic way. Every Friday when they are done writing, I check their letter and their journal gets packed in their backpack. It goes home with them and the person they wrote to writes back on the other side of their letter. The journal comes back to school with them on Monday and we spend a few minutes sharing what our families said to us. They love to read the praise from their parents! My favorites are the letters from grandparents sharing stories of their own school experience! The other thing that I love about these journals is that they make a fun keepsake filled with memories from their third grade year!
I am sharing a copy of the letter to parents that I glue to the inside of their composition notebook to explain Home Journals. Unfortunately, Google was being difficult this evening and I couldn’t get it uploaded to Google Drive so you will have to download it from my TpT store. But it is FREE!
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