Section 5 Academic Journals

What is an academic journal? Simply put, an academic journal is a way to track your thoughts and insights as you ready any work. It can contain many things: Notes Quotes Insights Drawings Questions to yourself or the text Opinions Reflections PAGE NUMBERS - ALWAYS!

Why do I use one? Reading extended works (books, research reports, etc.) Is challenging for everyone for several reasons: The brain can only focus for <15 minutes at a time. As soon as it starts learning, the brain starts to dump information to make room for what's new! That's right! Your brains wants to forget! It's an adaptation to make sure it doesn't run out of space by remembering unimportant details. Can you remember the color of the shirt of the person sitting next to you… last Wednesday? The shear volume of material in extended works requires strategies to disaggregate, understand, and retain it.

Stop and remember! Use retelling with smaller chunks of the large text to test your understanding of the basics: Characters Setting Plot Big ideas Use QAR with smaller chunks of the large text to test your understanding further: Smaller specifics (right there) Bigger picture (retell, summarize) Connections between text and self (Why did the author…? What would happen if…?) The super- big picture (How would I feel if…? What would I do if…?)

Put it all together! The material that you would use for Retelling or QAR is also great material for your journal! You just need to be more detailed and dig deeper into the text.

Don’t procrastinate! To be effective, you need to journal AS YOU READ. The whole point of the journal is to avoid having to reread lengthy sections of texts by organizing and expressing your ideas in real time. In other words, don’t wait to journal! It makes reading take a little longer, but you will save much more time not having to play the “where did I read that?” game. You always lose!

Let’s try it with “Last Night” by Bradbury Step one: draw a line down the left side of your page. Leave only enough space to write the page number. Step two: read the text and record any essential elements in your journal (names, quotes, dates, ideas, quick retellings, questions (be sure to hit all levels) etc). WRITE THE PAGE NUMBER FOR EVERY ITEM! Step three: as your read and record, highlight and annotate the text. Remember to select at least two elements for highlighting. This time I want you to highlight references to wants in one color and the idea of “what we deserve” in another.

Let’s try it for real…. Let’s journal the first two pages of Call of the Wild together.