I love using the Texas 2×2 books for lessons with my kinder, 1^st and 2^nd grade classes.  I usually do some sort of “Battle” at the end of the year with the books, and the kids always have a great time! (You can read more about that here.)   But I recently came up with a cool new idea to try journaling with the Texas 2×2 books!  Here’s what happened!

I’ve been using the Texas 2×2 books for many of my lessons with Kinder, 1st, and 2nd graders for a few years now, but I was itching to try to expand it in some way.  Then this summer, I went to a LibCamp and listened to the amazing Lisa Johnson talk about bullet journaling and how she uses it with her middle school students for reading journals. You can read little about it on her blog post here.

Right away, my creative juices started flowing as I wondered ”Would it be possible to try something similar with my younger students…Maybe create a way for them to have a memory book and try  journaling with the books that we read over the course of the year?”

So a few of my fellow awesome librarians met and started brainstorming ways that we could incorporate journaling with the Texas 2×2 books.  We thought about using those black composition books or spiral notebooks that kids use for their other classes.  While we figured this would work for 2^nd graders, and maybe even 1^st graders, we struggled with how much our kinder kiddos could do, especially at the beginning of the year.  So, I started to create a template page that we could use with the little ones, and pretty soon additional ideas started flying out.  We decided to create a journal page for each book where, after reading the story, kids could draw or write things they liked about the story, new words they heard, funny parts, connections….the possibilities are endless!

Our plan is to collect them at the end of each library visit, and hand them back out when they visit the following week.  I will store them in baskets that I will have by my story time area, along with pencils, crayons, and colored pencils.  At the end of the year, they would have a memory book of all the books we read together in the library to take home and share with their families.  We decided to copy the journal like this:

• Front and back cover on white cardstock
• All other pages single sided on white paper, in the order that we will read them
• Stapled together as a packet
• **We did add about 5 blank pages at the end of the journal for other books we read that come up or the kids could use it for their own books they’ve read.

I’ve tried to make this journal activity versatile, depending upon how much time you have with your students.  Each book has: 1) the basic page where students can write/draw their thoughts or connections to the book. 2) Some books lent themselves to additional activities such as research skills that I also included.   I wrote up a general timeline on how I plan on using the books, and included links to additional activities or ideas that you could do with the books.  You can find that here.

I’m so excited to see what the kids come up with, and can’t wait to see them share their thoughts about the books after we read them!  I plan to have many of my own journaling pages already completed for each book so that I can share my thoughts as well.  I’ll keep a few to do along with them in the beginning just to show the creative process!  

If you don’t use the Texas 2×2 books for your lessons, I created an editable version of the journal so that you can type in your own book titles or print them as is and let the kids write in their own titles.  Each year, these journal pages will be updated with the new Texas 2×2 list.  Be watching for those updates to be posted around Spring Break time. (That’s usually when I have a break from school to get them completed.)  All you’ll have to do is re-downoad the activity and Voilà…You will have the new journal pages!  

If you would like to try this activity with your kids, you can find this activity here on my webpage or here at my TpT store.  I’ll update this post once we get started with any additional tips or tricks to help things run smoothly! I hope you have fun journaling with the Texas 2×2 books with your kids!