FOLDABLE LOVE

A big part of creating ISNs with my students is developing foldables and other interesting note-taking ideas for those "Left Hand Learning" pages.

As I said I find fun creative ideas on line. When I first started organizing last summer I collected a bunch of foldable ideas. And corresponding PDF documents for them. I found these gave me ideas structurally but I really didn't use the PDFs much as they didn't really line up properly in my copy machine. But I'll share everything to give you ideas on what you can use.

3 door fold:

4 Door Shutter Fold:

6 Door Shutter Fold:

6 Door "French Door Fold" - I use this one a lot! And this link is the document you see below (word doc) that can easily be adapted by changing the headings etc.

Now I like the little booklets but they can be very time consuming to make. I just found instructions on doing one at the end of this past school year. I've haven't tried it with students, but it seems pretty easy to walk through it with them, they'll just have to write their own headings, etc.  Here are the detailed instructions. 

Of course, there are lots of other options. I have this very large PDF in my files on all kinds of foldables for math. I didn't really use the document this year, but now that I finished a year of ISNs I'll have to go through it more closely with an "experienced eye". 

And I like Sarah's musings on how to start an interactive notebook at this blog post here. Basically you just jump in and do it. Additionally she has a vertical number line on that post that her students found useful. I didn't use it in my classes, but it is very cool and I think it would be useful. PDF for that is here. 

And when I'm having students define terms or organize parts of new concepts I find graphic organizers to be useful. Sometimes they just draw a free hand frayer diagram. Or I provide one for them to glue in. 

Here is a frayer diagram you can print on legal size paper

 or a smaller frayer diagram can be found here. (6 per page, 8.5x11 paper)

 And I also like this wheel organizer. 

Final thoughts on planning your ISN pages. It really helps if you've taught the class before because you know the big ideas and the specifics of what you want the students to know. I think about that and use some scrap paper to play around with how that might look in a foldable. I use the 6 door french door fold a lot, especially in my precalculus class. I try to get creative sometimes but that particular fold is so useful and efficient. I did finish up this year with an interested diamond fold item for them, but it was tricky and didn't hold a lot of information. The basic fold idea looks like this:

But I hold mine more "diagonally" and the text in this is for verifying trig identities. But you can always change that to suit your lesson. Here is my document.