In my classroom, I have found that through the support of notebook work, students can grow their writing and strengthen their ideas. With strong ideas, they can write better first drafts. The work we do in notebooks before rushing into a draft gives us time to envision our work, to find mentor texts we love, and to study those texts. In doing so, we actually are doing a lot of the "revision" on our "vision" before we write the draft. -- Nonfiction Notebooks

Aimee Buckner has introduced writer's notebooks to hundreds of classrooms through her popular book Notebook Know-How,...