Interactive Student Notebooks

Notebook Common Attributes Left-Side spiral bound Minimum of 100 sheets Three-hole punched Bring to every class Organizational pages Title and Unit pages

Title Pages

Unit Pages

Right Side Activities Teacher Assigned Activities Title and Date for each activity Notes (discussion, teacher, collaborative, reading – SQ3R/KWL) Historical essays, directed personal responses, journaling, lab reports, self-assessments Unit standards and outcomes

Notebook Assignment: US Constitution Connections to Today Find a newspaper article that describes an action carried out by one branch of the US Federal Government. Highlight the sentence or sentences you think relate to something you have learned in this unit. Paste it on the left side. Then, on the right side, write a summary of the article that includes: 1. a sentence that states whether the action was carried out by the legislative, executive, or judicial branch. 2. a description of the power(s) that the branch exercised. 3. an explanation of how the power(s) could be checked by one of the other two branches. 4. writing that is free of spelling and grammatical errors.

Notes

Historical Essays

Left-Side Activities Time Out Activities are student created activities that are unassigned Graphic organizers, webs, Venn Diagrams, cartoons, maps, illustrated timelines, dictionary entries, equations, newspaper articles/research Use lots of color to illustrate

Mind Notes Wordgrams

Point of View Drawings

Mind Notes

Mind Notes

Point of View Cartoon Illustrated Dictionary

Equations

Invitation

Map

Articles and research must be processed highlight important parts describe the connection

Evaluation Criteria How? Holistic, 6+1 Rubrics How Often? 2-4 weeks or after each assignment For What? Quality, completeness, presentation, organization Who? Student self-assess and reflection; teacher evaluation; parent evaluation

Teacher Considerations it takes about 7-12 minutes on average to evaluate each notebook (if checking at end of 3-5 weeks) planning is essential before the year begins so that instruction in the first month includes a review of various ways to express and link concepts give students time to evaluate others and to self- reflect (especially after their 1 st check) instruct students to skip 5 pages for the table of contents after they create their title page