I will be finishing up my first Science unit of study on Ecosystems and my first Math unit of Study on Place Value in the next few days. This has been an interesting year with notebooks so far. The students are having to adjust to this "new" kind of teaching, but they seem to be enjoying themselves tremendously. I know I'm enjoying watching their little hands cut and glue, learn to fold paper in ways never thought of, and ever so carefully "attempt" to only use a "DOT of glue" rather than a glob.
Over the last 3 years of notebooking, I've learned A LOT of things that work and A LOT of things that are disasters. So far this year, no disasters. However, teaching 9 and 10 year olds how to make a book with a table of contents and unit divisions has proven to be a huge challenge! Some results are not so splendid...some pages have devastating results - out of order, glued together, skipped, and just plain messy, or even missing parts, but nothing that can't be lived with and improved upon as the days go by.
I want to share my notebooks, both Math and Science, page by page in hopes to inspire other teachers to take on this challenge. Notebooking is a true hands-on teaching approach that engages ALL students throughout the entire lesson. We use many other resources to obtain our information for each page. And yes, I do spend hours developing these pages to expose them to all the vocabulary words and content in our standards.
One of my biggest questions concerning notebooks has always been, "to grade or not to grade?" Well, this year my decision has been "TO GRADE"! The majority of students have taken to the notebooks and are now able to organize a lot of new learning. Through a nine week grading period, I will grade the notebooks 4-6 times depending on the number of pages completed during a unit. These grades are nothing more than simple checks of whether or not the students are taking responsibility for their own learning and engaging themselves in our studies during our limited class periods. I developed a rubric to send home to the parents so they can also see their student's progress.
My favorite part of the notebooks is that they are personal. The students are putting their "blood, sweat, and tears" into their notebooks. They are writers, designers, creators, and most of all learners! I hope this type of teaching gets many of them excited about becoming life long learners and lets them know they can be successful no matter how difficult the subject matter.
Below are a few of the items we use almost everyday in my classroom...
Why liquid glue? Because the stick glue will dry up on the paper and the foldables, pictures, diagrams, envelopes, etc. will fall out everywhere. And, it isn't fun to figure out which of the 44 students lost their "food chain foldable".
Why colored pencils? Because crayons can't be sharpened efficiently, markers leak through the pages, and the best part...they can be erased, maybe not perfectly, but the page can be recovered if a big booboo was made.
Why composition books? Because the pages are sewn into the binding. I've used spirals for the last two years and they have been nothing but a headache. After so much page turning, they begin to fall out and the metal wires tend to catch on other spirals causing a jumbled disaster of notebooks.
Happy Notebooking!!!
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