Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I know a first grade teacher who wants to start notebooking with her little guys. She has enough experience to know that a normal compostion book will not work. She asked her group of students to purchase a primary composition book that has a large space for pictures on top and young child friendly lines below. The problem she ran into was that the local stores don't stock them in the quantity that she needed and none of her parents could find them. She ended up having to purchase through the internet. This can get pricy...I saw them from anywhere from $4+ to $2+ (depending on how many you ordered). I believe that she got the funds approved through her principal (she is at a title one school) and is currently waiting for the shipment to come through. I am excited to see how she will incorporate notebooking in this young grade.

In a previous post I have links to a set of starter pages that are downloadable and just wanted to clarify. I don't use everything in those pages and they are not in the order I would put them in the notebook (although I wouldn't put them in the book next year except in booklet form to save my gluing sanity :) and space. The page picture above is a perfect example. I don't use the sensory figure instructions. In my modified set of starter pages I have taken this out. It seemed more for social studies notebooks then science. Also, a few posts down I noted that I changed my title page requirements to simplify. I changed my starter pages to reflect that and I included the number of lines students were to go down after experiencing problems last year. The original starter pages that I received my first year of teaching had a TON more pages - my contact information, table of content, class requirements and textbook information, an overview of our topics of study, more detailed...

In my first year of teaching I was given these starter pages from my team teacher, Mrs. Gannon, who maintains a social studies blog for the Interactive Notebooks (IAN). There are about 16 pages of "instructions" on various notebooking activities from how to write an appropriate acrostic poem to how to put together a storyboard in the notebook. Students can use these instructional pages to refer back to how an assignment should be done. Over the years I have modified these instructional pages, deleting what I don't use, clarifying something I might use a lot, or simply revising it all together. I've seen some other revised starter pages that also include Cornell notetaking strategies. I have always pre -glued these pages into the notebook, skipping the first page (which is the notebook title page). As stated above this takes up 16 pages of the notebook. It hasn't been a problem for me, as I have always had enough space. Last year both Mrs. Gannon, and another n...