Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I saw this when Dinah Zike presented at NSTA last year (Boston). I thought what a fabulous way to get more space out of your notebook pages! Not only can you present information on the flip up page but then students can write more information underneath. This method is featured in her notebooking book ( http://www.dinah.org/ ). I have been experimenting with glue verses tape. The first picture I taped the map down (taping edge to edge....if you use tape do not go past the edge or it no longer flips up as smoothly) the other two pictures I glued the top portion down (that is probably the best way to go. I was just experimenting with the tape). Picture #1 - I downloaded a map of all the countries that use the metric system verse the standard system. Underneath students created a simple "cheat sheet" to help them remember that a millimeter is approximately the size of your pencil tip, centimeter as wide as your finger, etc. Picture #2 - Students were compairing and contrasting ...

This was another textbook engagement activity that I fit into the notebook. I created a catalog template in Microsoft Publisher and deleted all the preformatted items that came with it. I then gave the catalog a new title page that fit the chapter students were working in (in this case Seedless Vascular Plants). On the inside, students had to find the information I requested from the chapter. I had questions, cloze notes, drawings, etc. To differentiate I put the page numbers and I kept all the informational sequential so that students were not having to flip back pages to find information. I've done this with elementary school students successfully.

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....

I use Microsoft Publisher templates a lot in my notebooks. This one was an experiment I tried in the middle school using their brochure template. I got the idea from a reading class I took where the instructor had us design a brochure that summarized the ideas from a particular chapter. The idea was good but probably not all that well thought out. It was entirely too much writing for some of my students and I would certainly tone that aspect down if I were to introduce it in the elementary school. My inside flap of the brochure had key vocabulary words from the chapter that they had to define. I liked that and would keep that going forward. The middle and last flap I had students look at the subheadings of the chapter (which I wrote into the brochure) and asked them to give me two sentences that isolated the main points of each subheadings (there were a lot). My struggling students had a very hard time with this project. I wound up having to differentiate (the assignment was originally...

With the left hand/right hand rule I am always trying to keep all the written information on one side (left hand) but sometimes there is just too much information and I can't contain it to one small side of the book. In cases like this I adapt (see pictures above). Picture 1 and 2 - I used Microsoft Publisher "catalog" template to create a mini booklet. I deleted all of the publisher information that pops up automatically with the template and replaced it with my own. I gave it a title page and wrote all my information on the inside and glued the back cover to the book. This gave me a lot more space to add information. Pictures 3 and 4 - I just used the standard Word document (see my post on formatting word documents for composition notebooks) and folded it in half. I had students design a title for it and then we glued the back side to the book. Picture 5 - I just typed in Word without formatting for the notebook and folded it in half and glued it in the book.

There are some "extras" you can add to your notebook. Above you will see ribbon that has been taped into the book. That served as a bookmark. I had the students knot the end because ribbon tends to fray. I liked the bookmark. Another teacher I know had student put beads on the end of their bookmark. I also glued an envelope to the back cover. I saw another teacher do that and she used it for loose leaf papers. I recently used mine to store the accordion card project while students were working on it. The same teacher also glued envelopes (2) to the front cover and it stored things like homework and bathroom passes. I never used mine that I glued in the middle school so I didn't add it to my elementary school books.

This was an activity I did with students where we discussed lab safety. I made flip safety symbols using the greeting card format in Microsoft Publisher. I had the students try and guess what the symbols meant and they wrote the correct thing underneath each tab. Below that I had students take notes regarding general lab safety rules (there were ten in all). Their right hand assignment was to create a lab safety poster focusing on one of the ten lab rules of their choice. They had to list three reasons why the rule was important on the poster.