"My Thinking Matters" Post-it Sheet

Years ago, my back starting to get sore from carrying the reader’s notebooks home and I was tired of losing post-its that I collected from students with their thinking so I created a “My Thinking Matters” post-it sheet.  Using a word document, I drew four boxes to represent post-its and titled the document “My Thinking for…..” The four boxes are blank and waiting to be filled with the students’ thinking!  Sometimes during read aloud, I have students use these sheets to jot down their thinking instead of using their reader’s notebooks so I can easily collect the sheets. 

When I ask students to use the post-it sheets instead of their reader’s notebooks, I ask them to stop and jot four times during the read aloud (one idea in each box) and I give them prompts that address specific skills. I might ask students to write about visualization, character traits, character change, character relationships, lessons, symbols, inferences, or theories.  When I collect the thinking sheets, I use their responses to help me plan instruction in mini-lessons, small groups, and future read alouds.  I also use this sometimes as a baseline assessment to identify the levels my students are at in certain skill areas at the beginning of a unit.  Toward the end of the unit, I ask students the same questions to measure their growth in the skill areas. 
This is a quick way to get a "look" inside students' minds as readers to see which skills they have already internalized and which skills they need to strengthen. 

"My Thinking Matters" Post-it Sheet

Happy Reading and Thinking! :)