I’ve already said it. I love notebooks. I have found them to be so helpful for so many students. If you want to know more about that, click here. This post is focused on making them effective.
I have read about people that abandoned notebooks because they found them ineffective and were not adding to student success. I have absolutely been there! When notebooking first became a thing, I jumped on board and honestly, I felt like they were effective. It was a record of learning and we added so many things to it. Short reading excerpts, notes, lab data charts, vocabulary (though not the most effective vocab strategies were used), our practice work, and so many other things. I had a few strategies that we used to help keep them organized and useful, but I didn’t go crazy with anything else. Then…came the rise of PINTEREST!
I saw all the pretty colors, the amazing pictures, and so many ways to fold paper! I’d used foldables, but this was something else entirely! You could cut the pictures and build a foldable! You could put teacher input on one side and student output on the other! Such organization! We could spend so much time cutting and pasting and coloring. And we did. As teachers, you know it wasn’t effective. The activities weren’t engaging at all. They were cutting and pasting. If they have to spend more time cutting and putting the thing together than doing actual content work, there is a problem. After watching a teacher that shared my room spend an entire block working with her class on an organelle flashcard cutting activity, I clearly saw the problem.
I thought about abandoning notebooks, but they had served me well, so I kept them and I abandoned all my Pinterest perfect foldables and coloring activities. (This is not me hating on Pinterst. I LOVE Pinterest, but not everything is a good idea). This was not a notebook problem. They are just a tool. This was a teacher problem. I was using ineffective teaching techniques. I got back to my 5 E’s.
Engaging Activities:
- Analyze/Interpret
- Apply
- Cause/Effect
- Compare/Contrast
- Classify/Categorize
- Create/Develop
- Draw Conclusions
- Evaluate
- Infer
- Make Connections
- Sequence
- Summarize
- Predict
- Graph/Chart/Table
- Diagram
- Visual/Illustrate
- Web/Cycle/Chain
- Model
- Informational Text
- Advertisement
- Demonstration
- Investigation/Experiment
- Map
- Formula/Equation
- Bulleted List
Guess what goes in my notebooks now? Content reading, notes, vocab (more effective strategies), lab data tables, graphs, critical writing, and anything I use from the list above. That means, pretty much everything.
I still use certain foldables because they are useful, but I do not use anything that requires more time to cut the pieces out than it does to do the work. If you need to draw a Venn diagram, have them turn the notebook to the side and draw two circles. This does not require a pre-printed Venn diagram foldable for cutting. We still create a foldable to compare photosynthesis and cellular respiration. It is quick to make and they really can’t mess up the work after that. They do all the work that goes in it though. I do not give that to them. It is effective and engaging.
TL,DR: The most important thing you can do to make your class notebooks effective is to use engaging activities. You do not need to make them fancy or spend a lot of time on them. It is simply a place to put their work for a record of learning.
