Teacher Version of the Notebook

Last year I saw another sixth grade teacher who kept a teacher copy of the students notebook with notes about how the activities ran, modifications she would use next year, etc. I thought it was a great idea. However, as good plans often go...I found I didn't update it like I should. Still the idea had merit.

I tried again this year (fourth grade) and I have been much better about gluing in sheets to my teacher notebook but have been lacking in the note taking department (one year I will get it all right!).

My mistake in studiously maintaining my teacher notebook this year is that I glued ahead what I was going to do with students. Turns out I have had to adjust several times and have not used certain lab sheets and others with students that were now in my notebook. This has been driving me insane since now my teacher copy does not match the students copy for this year (oh well!). I figure I learned the hard way not to glue ahead :)

Comments

Anonymous said…

I also keep a copy of the notebook that the kids keep - I absences in my copy and I also write down pages from the ScienceSaurus that I use to go along with each lesson - that way I know who missed what and where to find it.

March 29, 2009 at 10:47 PM

julian said…

How about a loose-leaf master notebook instead?

June 19, 2014 at 11:30 AM

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&

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog