Teaching the Kid: Interactive Science Notebooks

It didn't take me long last year to recognize the benefit of students having a notebook for their notes and glued in important worksheets. I often had kids throwing away graded assignments as soon as they got them back and students not remembering information that we had taken note on.

When researching the internet I found the fabulous Interactive Notebooks! I knew this was going to be an important part of my classroom my second year.

Online you'll find lots of ways that other people set up their notebooks. I have taken what I've liked and passed by what I didn't like. One thing I really didn't like was the LEFT PAGE/BRAIN and RIGHT PAGE/BRAIN deal, where you have specific things reserved for each side of the page. No no no. I can't think like that. We'll use that next page for whatever we need, whenever we need, thank you very much!

These are the students' ISN notebooks, grouped by the class they are in. I have since moved the little black books down. That large pile is my one seventh grade class with all 15 seventh grade sped students in one block. Next week the schedule is changing and they'll be in two separate classes, making it more manageable.

I've gained a lot of inspiration from different bloggers, but mostly from the Math = Love blog. She teaches math but I have taken so many of her ideas on how she organizes and gives praise when kids do well on quizzes. I first heard about this teacher via a radio broadcast featuring her and her blog when I drove home from work one day. So glad I tuned the radio to the news that day. (Seriously, she's amazing. If you've never seen her blog, CLICK ON THE LINK!!!)

Here are a few features of my Interactive Science Notebooks (ISNs):

Title Page.
Students were required to have their name, title of notebook, and class information, as well as a drawing of what science meant to them. In the pictures below, I've taken the shot just below their names to retain privacy.

This girl hasn't finished coloring hers in yet. This is something they work on when they finish early with other assignments.

The green man is a scientist? Or a bandit? Or a martian? :P
Unit Table of Content Pages
I got this from Math=Love (Click to get the file she posted on her blog. That's what I used!) Most people have a huge table of contents for the entire book, but I really liked Ms. Hagan's idea to have mini table of contents at the beginning of each unit. I think it makes it much more manageable and acts as a preview for the unit.

One student's example (spelling is some thing we'll need to work on!)

Progress Monitoring Page
This one is mine. In college one of our classes had a quiz we took multiple times throughout the semester. We tracked our progress on the different sections throughout the semester. When we reached passing grade for a section twice in a row, then we never had to take that section of the quiz again. My students have the same requirement––they have to reach 85% on a quiz section twice before they have officially passed that section and don't have to take it again.

This page allows students to track their progress on these quizzes and on the material taught this unit. It also is teaching students the skill of the graphing and the relationship between a table and a graph. My sped kids really need help with this. I'm hoping that by the end of the year this will be a skill they have mastered, since with every unit they will put their score in the table and graph it.

I'll have to add another picture at the end of the unit so you can see the progress. Section 1's line will all be done in orange (for every student). Section 2 will be a different color, and so will section 3. That way students can keep track of each section on the line graph.

I only test the sections of the unit that we've covered. On 8/15 I had only covered the first section. The students just took their second trial (a week after the first), and they had to take both section 1 and 2, since we covered section 2 that week. We'll be covering section 3 the next week and then they'll be taking the entire quiz (unless they've passed a section off already).

I've already found this beneficial as it has encouraged the students to study. We took their second trial on Friday and I gave them a couple of minutes to study. I had them really trying their best and even teaming up to test each other. So this is beneficial because the students know what material they are expected to learn (and will be tested on) and they want to improve.

Things I do to make ISNs easier:

Have my own draft copy
I write in this and scribble in this and have ideas of how I want different pages to look. It's really great and gives me the space to try something or decide I don't like something before I print out the final activity and give it to students. I have one for my 7th grade curriculum and one for my 8th grade curriculum, and started drafting in them over the summer.

From this draft I realized the print-outs were too big and there wasn't any room for the conclusion. This allowed me to do a quick fix to the document before having the kids do it the next day.

Have my own teacher-copy for each period.
Each class has it's own official teacher copy for me (separate from my draft copy). I use this to model for the kids exactly how I'm pasting foldables in, exactly what page they're on, etc. I think this is especially helpful for my kids, being sped and needing good visual scaffolding, but is a good principle for any group of kids. It's also useful for kids who join my class schedule late (because schedules are never official until after the first 2-3 weeks, right? And even then they change, especially since I'm a sped teacher. Every year some kids graduate from sped and some kids enter sped.) and I can show them mine for reference to help them get caught up.

I'll soon be adding another one since my 7th grade class just split. Can we say scheduling one more time?

This is the official copy of the draft above that I made with my kids. (My averages weren't accurate––I was teaching and trying to go quick and show them how to make the graph). Some parts are directly copying me and others are for them to fill in (in this case, the experiment results and the rest of the conclusion).

Table Kits
Each table has an assigned Materials Manager, whose job it is to bring materials to the table, manage materials during class, and gather and return all materials at the end. Each table has a numbered basket that has numbered scissors, numbered markers, and a numbered glue sponge. I kind of went over board on the numbering (Yes, I wrote the group number on every marker with permanent marker) because I'm kind of paranoid about losing materials and kids stealing them. The baskets will also have added whatever other materials may be needed that day. But enough about that; I know you're all wondering about one material in particular, which brings me to my next item of things that make ISNs easier:

I need a picture of the updated kits with the numbers on them.

Glue Sponges!
Seriously the best thing ever. I got this idea this summer while perusing the internet for interactive notebook ideas. I found a video The Kindergarten Smorgasboard who uses glue sponges in his classroom and finds they are the best way to have glue in the classroom. They don't make a mess and they eliminate problems that arise when some students thinks the entire back of the page needs to have glue on it––and not just a thin layer of glue, but the entire glue bottle. So we're saving glue by doing this, too.