Class journals

This lesson plan suggests how a 'first lesson' with class journals might be set up. This will introduce learners to the idea of regular writing, and to get them working with journals from the beginning of a course or period of study.

The kind of class journal in this lesson plan is designed to get learners writing freely in a range of different ways. The emphasis is on fluency, similar to oral fluency activities that we do with students.  Rather than focusing on accuracy, or a particular style, we want students to express their ideas in any way that seems best to them. In this way, we will help them to build a writing habit, and to write more confidently. For more background about using class journals, please see the Teaching English article that links to this lesson plan.

Lesson outcomes

Learners will:

• reflect on what helps learn languages
• start a class journal by writing at least two journal entries
• compare different ways of correcting writing

Materials

• Lesson plan
• Presentation
• Notebooks/paper to create journals, or access to a word processor/an online document

Lead-in (5 minutes)

• Ask the learners to raise their hands if they have kept a diary before. Explain that journal is another word for diary. Then ask learners to raise their hands if they have ever kept a class journal before. If anyone says yes, ask them about their experience – when? in what class? what did they write in it?
• Tell learners that they are going to create a class journal.
• Show Slide 2 or write on the board or dictate these four options to learners: in a new notebook; on paper that is stapled together; on a word processing document (e.g. a Word document); on an online document (e.g. GoogleDocs, or *Padlet.com) where they divide each journal entry with a heading/line. If they use an online document, ask learners to share the link. *Padlet is an online blog which requires sign up, but is free for a limited amount of pages.
• Put learners in pairs and ask them to tell their partner what type of journal they want to make, from the four options. Ask the class to tell you what they decided.
• Give learners some time to find a dedicated space in a notebook they have (e.g. the back), or to staple a number of A4 sheets together, if possible with a colourful card cover, or to turn on their device and set up a new electronic document and save it with an appropriate name.

Making a front cover (10 minutes)

• Tell learners they will now create a front cover (for a physical journal) or a front page (for an electronic journal).
• Show Slide 3 or draw the shape of a shield and a pie chart on the board. Using your own life as an example, complete the parts of the shield/pie chart with images/words that you identify with in some way. This could include hobbies, where you live, places you like, or a favourite person/pet/belonging.   
• Ask learners to now start making their own front cover/first page in class. *Either set a strict time limit for this or say it can be finished for homework.
• Once they have finished, ask learners to show and describe what they have created so far to a partner.

Writing task 1 (15 minutes)

• The aim of this activity is for learners to write about themselves.
• Set learners a personalised writing task. If you often start a course by writing a personal letter to the students, they could read your letter at this point and write a reply to it in their journal.
• Alternatively, you could set up a personalised task like this:
• Show slide 4 or write the list below on the board.
• 3 things that you enjoy doing
• 3 people who are important to you
• 3 places that you’ve been to / would like to go to
• 3 things you did last weekend
• 3 things you own that are important to you
• 3 films / books / series that you like, and why you like them.
• Ask learners to choose 1, 2 or 3 categories to include on the first page of their journals. They should write as much information as they can in about 10 minutes. Play some background music while students are writing.
• After 10 minutes, learners work in pairs, and swap journals. They should try to find at least one thing in common with their partner.

Writing task 2 (15 minutes)

• Show the learners one of the following YouTube clips:
• The Power of Words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpcB82aUz4
• (Piper) A Joy Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-JFks6uI0
• Divide the class into 2 groups. Give each group 1 character (the blind man/the woman OR the heron/the dog).
• Show slide 5 or tell the class they will write about 100 words about the event from their own perspective - What happened at first? How did you feel at first? What did you think of the other character? What happened in the end?
• After 10 minutes, learners swap their journals, and read what someone from the other group has written. They then write a comment to their partner at the end of the paragraph, e.g. I like your description / what do you mean by…?  / You explain your ideas very well etc.
• NOTE: If you do not have internet access in class another good ‘character writing’ activity could be based on a fairy story the learners already know, e.g. Red Riding Hood, then writing about different characters’ perspectives (the wolf, the girl, the grandmother).

Feedback (10 minutes)

• The aim of this activity is for learners to understand how teacher to learner journal feedback could happen.
• Explain that the teacher can respond to their journals by writing an evaluative comment, and/or by correcting the language errors. *If possible, a good idea is to show learners some examples of previous journals or pieces of work that you’ve commented on.
• Ask learners to work in groups of 3 for 5 minutes. Show slide 6 or tell the class to discuss the advantages & disadvantages of:
• Writing evaluative comments (no error correction)
• Correcting all errors (no other comments)
• Highlighting (but not correcting)  some errors for learners to work on (no other comments)
• Then ask the groups for their views. Accept any reasonable answers.
• Ask each learner to write a brief comment about how they would like their journal writing to be corrected, in the back cover of the journal.

NOTE: If you decide to use a correction code with your class, this would be a good moment to introduce the code, and to get learners to write the symbols at the back of their journal, for future reference.

Reflection (5 minutes)

• The aim of this activity is to find out the learners’ attitudes towards the journals. Hopefully, students will recognise that, although they may feel initially reluctant about writing activities, these activities can be very powerful tools in helping them to improve their level of English.
• Put learners in small groups. Show slide 7 or write up the following on the board:
• Have you enjoyed the journal activities?
• Do you think the journal can help you get better at English? Why/why not?
• How often should we journal? Why is having a habit a good idea?
• What other journal tasks could we do?
• Ask some learners to tell you what their group said. Make a note of other journal tasks the learners want to do, and try those next.

Homework journal task

The aim of this activity is for learners to write about learning. Learners go to a new page of their journal. Show slide 8 or dictate the following sentence starters to the learners. At home they should complete them, so that they are true for themselves. I think that learning English is… The most difficult to me about English is… The easiest thing is... The best way to remember vocabulary is... I will get better at speaking if I... One way for me to improve my English at home is to... I want to write English in order to... The next class, set up a pyramid discussion as follows: firstly, learners compare their ideas in pairs, and add new ones to the list if they want.