Your Guide to using Interactive Notebooks

1. Your Guide to using Interactive Notebooks Sally Creel Science Supervisor sally.creel@cobbk12.org

2. Essential Question: • How do I use interactive notebooks to engage students and maximize learning in my classroom?

3. What are Interactive Notebooks? • Notebooks are a highly individualized way for students to interact with: • The content/concepts being learning • Themselves and their thinking • The teacher

4. The Process… • Can be challenging • Takes a bit of patience • Requires modeling, modeling, modeling • Must consistently be reinforced • Learning curve for both the teacher and the students

5. The Payoff… • Students are able to organize their work • Uses reading strategies within a content area, such as science, social studies or math • Helps students (& teachers) distinguish between what they know and what needs more attention

6. And Finally… • Students make their own meaningful connections • It encourages pride in student work • It encourages cooperative learning • It appeals to multiple intelligences • The kids love it and learn so much!

7. Why Interactive Notebooks? • The format is engaging to multiple learning styles: • Visual, kinesthetic, linguistic, and more • Encourages application of writing strategies in variety of contexts • Facilitates higher order and independent thinking

8. Benefits over time… • Notebooks become a portfolio on individual learning and a record of each student’s growth. • Teachers, students, and parents can review a student’s progress in writing, recording, thinking, and organization skills.

9. How is the Notebook assessed? • There are multiple assessment options: • Formatively • Progress monitoring daily/weekly/spot check • Provide commentary about a concept or written response • Summatively using a rubric • Individual assignments basis • Selected sections assessed for conventions

11. No one “Right” way! • Just like writing a story…there are any number of procedures, techniques, components, and elements to use when creating interactive notebooks with your students. • They should be a reflection of your classroom and style of teaching & learning

12. How Do I Get Started? • At least one month in advance, identify a subject and concept with which to begin • As you plan your upcoming unit of study, create a model interactive notebook your would like your students to create. • Identify necessary concepts, materials, and procedures you are going to use.

13. What Students Need… • The notebook-loose leaf paper in a three pronged folder, spiral notebook, or composition book • Pencils, regular and colored • Liquid glue, a glue stick, or tape • Scissors • Paper, graphic organizers, assessments, etc… • Grading expectations

14. Notebook Components: • Personalized Unit Title Page • Table of Contents • Standards • Unit EQ’s • Vocabulary Activities • Graphic Organizers • Foldables • The list goes on… Each student’s notebook should be unique! They may have similar assignments, but they should “LOOK” different! Say “No!” to cookie cutter notebooks!

15. Let’s Get Started!