Playtested: journal-type poker

It's hard to teach what a journal can be used for since it can be used for almost anything.   I said that yesterday.

The best way to teach what you don't know is to have your students go through the same process you would go through to figure it out.   So, yesterday I sent mine to Google "types of journals" and they came back with foodjournaldreamdiaryfeedbackjournaldialoguejournalhealthdiarytraveljournalmeditationjournal etc.

We narrowed it down to 4:

• Emotional intelligence journal: This is what you write in whenever you have an issue relating to emotional intelligence to deal with.  For example, if you had a fight with your best friend at recess, you write in it.  Or if you have trouble managing your time or leading your group or understanding why you don't get along with a particular teacher.
• Science journal: This is where you record scientific questions and observations based on readings, experiments and research.
• Creative writing journal:  This is where you note down words, phrases and ideas for songs, poems or stories
• Reading journal: This is where you respond to your readings, not just by summarising them but by adding your opinions, questions, likes and dislikes about the text.

Why these?  Why not?  You can't work with all of them, but we agreed these seemed the most useful.

Then we played "journal-type poker".

Each person wrote 2 entries for each of the 4 journal types (so 8 entries).   Then they put them in a pile and dealt 4 to each player.  The aim was to get either two pairs (ex: 2 science journals and 2 reading journals), 4 of a kind (ex: 4 science journals) or a "straight" (one of each).  If a player thought they'd won they had to show the journal entries and explain what type they thought they were.

One student, J, decided to be so creative in writing his journals entries that it was hard for the other players to identify what type of journal they were supposed to be.  This meant a great deal of arguing back and forth which I thought was great.  It meant they were practicing the language a lot, but it also led to a very interesting discussion on who has ownership of a text.  Is the writer the only one who gets to say what it means or, if the readers disagree, can they be right too?

Once they had an idea of what exactly makes a journal a journal (that it's personal, creative and periodic), then they thought about different ways to use them in their classes.  Turns out, you can fit journalling into almost any part of a lesson!