Slice of Life Museum

Many years ago I read an article about the journal museum in the classroom. I was so intrigued by what I read that I tried it almost immediately and have been using it ever since. The idea behind the journal museum is to allow all students to share a piece of writing at the same time. Students open up their notebooks to any entry they want. Then, they travel around the room with sticky notes and pencil in hand and read the entries of their classmates. After reading, they leave a comment on a sticky note and place it next to the entry.

The best part of this whole process is the engagement. All students are actively engaged reading their classmates' work.  It is also unbelievably quiet as students move from entry to entry. I always participate and love the mood in the room. We usually spend about 30 minutes in a museum and every student makes sure to visit everyone else's entry.

This year, my students are participating in the Slice of Life Classroom Challenge but in pencil/paper format. They have set a goal for themselves: 31, 25, or 21 days of writing, and it is all done at home. Every day they write a little slice about what happened during their day and check in with me first thing in the morning. I chat with each student about what they wrote  and then put a sticker on our tracker chart. My students LOVE this, and I have 100% participation.

This past week I introduced sharing SOL with the students, and it didn't take off like I expected. My students do Sacred Writing Time four days a week and always share, so sharing is not new.

So today, I did a Slice of Life Museum. First, we went over to the Slice of Life Classroom Challenge and read a few posts that caught the students' eyes. They were intrigued by students writing from other countries so those were the ones we wrote and commented on. We talked about what type of comments someone might like to hear.  I then had the students choose one entry from their notebook they wanted to share and arm themselves with a pencil and sticky notes. Since I am doing Slice of Life online, I put up a post that I was comfortable with my students reading. And away we went.

My favorite part of the whole museum is watching the students read the comments from others and, of course,  reading the comments left for me.