Interactive Notebooks are one of the newest and most talked about teaching strategies right now. There are so many ideas and opinions it gets easy to get lost and not know where to start. I want to share with you why I decided to start notebooking, how I setup notebooks, and how they work in my classroom.
I wanted to start notebooking during my first year of teaching. I had heard so much about the Left Side-Right Side or Input-Output setup and wanted to try it out. My problem was that I was left figuring it out, on my own, during my first year. It was far too overwhelming and became too confusing for me and for my students to be effective. Only a few months into the school year and I scrapped the notebooks and went back to traditional fill-in-the-blank notes and handouts.
The lightbulb moment for me came when I met one of our new science hires at school. She had been doing notebooks for four years and had already experienced many of the growing pains that I had gone through. Almost immediately, I started asking questions to figure out how she made it work. She described notebooks in a way that made sense for me:
It's like students are creating their own version of a textbook.
Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that students fill the pages with paragraphs and paragraphs of text, but it does mean that they are a reference tool for students and hold all the information students will need to be successful in a unit.
Why did I start notebooking?
- Organization: As a teacher of freshmen, there is a constant battle to help students stay organized. Notebooking helps keep them organized because we do all of the organization together in class.
- Accountability: It keeps them accountable because I ask them to go back and continue to review and reference past content. Because notebooks are kept in my classroom, I can page through notebooks at any time and remind students who are falling behind.
- Ownership: Students take pride and ownership of creating something that is theirs. There are lots of students who stay on task to make sure they have time at the end of class to color things just right or make their headings colorful. When students take ownership of their work, they try their very best to make sure they are doing everything correct.
- Brain Breaks: Notebooking allows me to build in automatic brain breaks that I often forget about otherwise. Teenagers have short attention span. Giving them a few minutes to cut and glue gives them time to refocus and get back on track when they need to.
What does a typical unit look like?
We take some notes -- although they are simplified and shortened -- and glue down diagrams, graphs, and pictures to help the notes make sense. We color code diagrams and paragraphs. We make foldables to use as study tools. We do labs with data tables, graphs, and conclusions. We write paragraphs. We do science.
The variety within the notebook helps keep students engaged. No two pages are the same and no two days in class are the same.
I am able to use many of the same activities I have always used, I just modify them for notebooks -- usually shortening up the procedure, or printing them in a smaller format to fit into the notebook.
What does a typical day in class look like?
- Students have 2 minutes at the beginning of class to collect supplies (usually glue, scissors, colored pencils), take their seat, and answer the warm up question.
- Take notes for 5 minutes and analyze a diagram.
- Discuss diagram and examples while students are cutting/pasting the diagram into their notebook.
- Give directions for activity, and students find a partner and get to work.
- Students have the rest of class to finish activity and notebook work.
- Early finishers can work on coloring, vocabulary, or past assignments.
We stay busy and we stay engaged with material, but we are moving and interacting. My classroom is not the type where you only sit and listen.
How are notebooks setup in my class?
This is something truly individual to each teacher. I have done a walk through of my notebook set up in this separate post.
How are notebooks graded?
This can vary widely from teacher to teacher. I grade each assignment in their notebook as individual assignments -- even dividing them into classwork/lab/homework grades depending on the activity. I typically grade notebooks at the end of each unit (about every 4 weeks) and I am able to grade them almost 100% at school on test days. I am no longer drowning in a pile of grading!
Hopefully this gives you some confidence and information to help you decide if notebook is right for your classroom.
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