Skip to main content

Spiral Notebooking


A friend of mine is teaching third grade and is notebooking with spiral bound notebooks. On the day I visited her classroom her children were doing an experiment with "mock rocks" based on an activity in either the Foss or Delta science kit.

She choose to use spiral notebooks because it allowed for more space with glueing and writing. I think the intent is that she would use one for each of her units (so they were the small spiral notebooks - 70 page count I think). I did see that some of the pages had started ripping out just by the way the students were handling them. I think that will improve with time as they move into their next unit/book.

Comments

Joli said…
That is the problem with spiral notebooks. One would need to spend more on a sturdier cover.

I love this blog!

I used to teach 6th grade science and we used notebooks (spiral). Absolutely everything was in there so when semester exam came around the students were ready.

Thank you for sharing!
Julie said…
I use spiral notebooks for my 3rd graders in science. I put vinyl tape over the spiral wire. This serves two purposes: safety when the wire pokes out and keeping the cover together. Every time we complete a unit we tear out the pages and staple a cover sheet on the front that the students illustrate with relevant material.

Popular posts from this blog

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

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.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link -  https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...