Skip to main content

Textbook Engagement


Here are other examples of how I used the interactive notebooks to engage with textbook material. The pictures above are from my middle school books but I have used both in the elementary school setting as well.
The first picture is a simple question strip. I asked a series of questions that the students had to find the answers to in their textbook. To differentiate instruction I put the page number where the students could find the information next to the question. In the elementary school I kept the first couple of sentence strips "easy" - meaning the answers could be found very easily and there were only about five questions. You can build up after students become familiar with the formatting of the strips and how you expect them to answer. Definitely model this! Students will try and write the answers under the question and not to the side as above.
The second one was a Who, What, Why, Where and When strip that I used with the terms migration, hibernation, and courtship. Students had to read the sections in the textbook and tell me who migrates, what is migration, why do animals migrate, where do they migrate and when do they migrate (they then got to draw a picture of the concept).

Comments

Alice said…
Thanks for sharing these. My son uses his Science notebook everyday. I often create extra "worksheets" in it. You just opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for us.
Your blog is amazing! I love seeing all these ideas for interactive notebooks. I am currently working towards my single subject credential in Science, so will be in my own classroom soon. I definitely want to have an interactive notebook!
angnux said…
Love this idea! One question. Do you provide formatted notebooks, or do you hand out the blank sheets that the students glue into their own notebooks? Do you allow the notebooks to leave the classroom? ( I'm afraid some won't return when needed)

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock...