Reading journals contain short responses to stories you are reading at the moment.  They are a great way to develop a variety of reading skills.

Purpose:
• To help you capture your developing responses as a reader
• To help you understand what you are reading
• To show how you are improving as a reader

What you could write about (pick one or two per entry):
• Speculations about how the story might develop (what will happen next?)
• Accounts of things that have happened to you that you are reminded of by events in the book
• Reflections on things in the book that really strike you
• Reactions to characters and what they do
• Comments on how the author is telling the story
• Connections to other books, films, plays or poems that you have read
• Questions you think of as you are reading
• Inferences about the underlying messages of the text
• Identification of the author’s purpose, important details, main ideas and themes
• Evaluations and opinions about the text

When you could write a response:
• At the beginning of a book
• As you are reading
• After an interesting part of a story
• At the end of a book (definitely!)