Things I Learned From My First Year Doing Interactive Student Notebooks

Planning and organization The summer before I started doing the ISN I did a lot of reading on the Internet. I searched "interactive student notebooks"  and read many blogs to see how different people did them. One thing I found is that everyone said do not do not try to create your ISN pages beforehand. Before reading this, I thought I would use the summer before to create all the pages for my algebra 1 class. No no no no. I heeded the advice and throughout the year I created the pages as we went. This was very important, Because even when I planned a little bit ahead and perhaps made a few pages I invariably made changes on what I had done. So if you are an organized advanced planner like I am, you need to let this go and just go with the flow through the year and create things as you need them. But there was some very useful advanced preparation that I could do. I spent some time last summer searching for examples of different foldables for the various topics I teach. I searched on the internet and I searched in Pinterest. As I found things that would be useful I saved them in folders for each unit in my algebra 1 class. This way throughout the year when I was creating foldables I could open a folder for a unit and find things and look at things that I found over the summer. Very useful to do that advanced searching and saving. But I still did some searching as I went during the year, because you can't always anticipate what you might want a foldable for.   Supplies and Such As I said I am a very organized person, so I wanted to be organized in my approach to having students make their interactive notebook. So again from the reading I did over the summer I found different ways to organize. One important thing is the arrangement of my classroom. I have my student desks in groups of 5 but try to have only four students sit in a group so the fifth desk is open to me to sit and help the students. My classroom is all closed up for the summer. So I can not show pictures of my classroom and how it is organized. Later in August I will take pictures and post a blog about my classroom set up. But here is a template for my seating chart.  I change my seats every month. I have a large white board in both the front and back of my classroom. I have an LCD player affixed to the ceiling through which I can project images using my document camera. The document camera has been crucial for smooth completion of foldables and notes. As we create the foldable and notes pages I write along with the students and they can see what I am doing with the document camera projecting the image. I only started using the camera in January and just love it and wish I had started sooner. I may have to buy one if I can't borrow one from the school library again. I have files on the counters in my room organizing any foldables that I've created and extra foldables for students who need one because they were absent or some other reason. I also have drawers where I keep colored paper and my original templates in files. I will have to take pictures of all these and include them in the blog post I will do in August that shows my classroom set up. Training My Students As student walk into my classroom they see the student objectives for the block posted on my front whiteboard. They also see what pages need to be added to their TOC or table of contents. I tried to have any foldables we are going to use on each grouping of desks so there is no time spent in class handing them out. Also each group of desks has a basket of supplies. In there they will find scissors, glue sticks, tape, and colored markers and pencils. If the basket of supplies are still on the side counter the students know to retrieve a basket for their group if they see a TOC addition on the whiteboard. We don't do the interactive student notebook every class but we do it most classes. How I use the ISN in my Lessons Generally I like to develop new concept by having students do some kind of exploration, usually in groups. Sometimes this will be by following instructions on my whiteboard and sometimes it will be using worksheets or a packet of information or problems. I use the ISN to summarize concepts. I don't use them to drive the lesson. It is a way to pull things together and solidify concepts and write things out for the student reference. Then the right-hand reflection page is used for students to do practice or to come up with examples or even the next class block do some warm up problems that are related to the foldable concept on the left hand page. This approach has worked very well for me. I get lots of positive feedback from students. There is another teacher in our department who also used these notebooks the first time this past school year. She actually got a lot of complaints. But I think she was using them to drive her instruction. All her notes were done in the notebook. I like to have some time beforehand where students explore and do problems and figure things out and we have discussion. Then we used to know books to summarize. Also I try not to get too fancy with the foldables. I like to be a little creative but some kids just are not into that, so I don't want to get so complicated that it distracts them from the concepts. There are always colored pencils and markers in their baskets so students can get individually creative if they want.