Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I was online looking for independent/dependant variable lesson/practice for students and came across this excellent site . The teacher has posted PowerPoint lessons and activity sheets that can easily be modified for incorporation into science notebooks. I saved quite a few and plan to cut and paste what I think will work with my groups this year both for the notebooks and for quizzes. Not looking for variable information? I still encourage you to check it out because she has PowerPoints from "What Is a Scientist?" to using the metric system.

Today is July 21st and Walmart currently has composition books on sale for .45 (a great deal considering the cheapest I have ever been able to find them is .50). I tend to buy what I need ahead of time - which helps if you want to pre -glue pages or reinforce the binding and edges with clear packaging tape. Once students come in with their supplies I collect a composition book to replace the stock I just purchased. Those get stored so I am ready for the next year. It is nice having the notebooks ready to go the first day of school. If you don't want to put out that much money ahead of time I would recommend getting a few so that those students who are slow to get their supplies will have them when you get started notebooking (that is generally about 3-5 students per class in my experience). If a child has purchased a Hannah Montana composition book or something they are really attached to I don't make it a big deal. I've only run into that problem a couple of times and t...

Here is a link that I got from Marcia Krech who posted in response on My Science Lessons Blog (link to the right "my blog list"). It is a lab safety "What Not To Do" activity that I thought would be easy to add to the notebook, with the picture on the left hand side and the match up sheet (found at the linked site) that students have to fill out on the right hand side. Thank you Marcia!

This wheel was posted by a 5th grade science teacher in NJ on her science blog (also linked to the right titled My Science Lessons). If you look at the green outer circle there are ideas for right hand assignments based on the various bloom's levels of taxonomy. She has a lot of great notebooking ideas and pictures. I loved her PowerPoint mystery footprint lesson for observations and inference, which is downloadable.

I met with another fourth grade science teacher (thanks Mrs. Felts) and she recommended the following book Writing Strategies for Science by Sarah Kartchner Clark. I looked through it and found several ideas that I could use in the notebooks that I could use or modify. The book is kind of expense on Amazon $30 but you can buy it used or try www.half.com (my favorite place for puchasing books...although sometimes the shipping can cost more then the book!).

Someone had a question about using the notebooks to study for tests. Good question! As mentioned in a much earlier post, I generally do not let the notebooks leave the classroom. I worked with a group of students my first year who did not take care of their supplies and often things that went home never came back. This was extremely frustrating so I stopped sending the notebooks home. Instead I adopted the study guide above from a co-teacher (thanks Ms. Gannon!). The children, parents, and I love it. Basically you create a two table grid in a word document (see first picture). You put a question on one side and the answer on the other. You can leave the answer part blank and students can fill that in during class. I only had about 45 minutes with my students last year and for the sake of time I would only leave a few blank that they would either fill out as we reviewed the study guide or I would give them a set amount of time to fill in the blanks using their notebook and then reviewe...