PreCalculus Interactive Student Notebook

                                
I teach an honors level PreCalculus class at my school (two sections) and I wasn't too sure about starting an interactive student notebook with them (ISN) as I do in my Algebra One classes. I've used foldables in our regular notetaking but wasn't sure about the whole "composition notebook" with all the parts that make up an ISN. So I tried it last year (2014-2015 school year) and it really was an incredible success. I found that the students enjoyed the little bit of creativity these notebooks required but mostly they all appreciated having all the concepts in one place and not cluttered with everyday notes and examples.

I have one year down with those notebooks so this second year I am going to fine tune things and blog about what I'm doing as I go. I hope some folks find this useful.

General set up

I don't get too fancy with the set up for the notebook. We get right down to business in this class. We have a lot of material to cover over the year. Incidentally, this class meets every other day with an 82 minute block. This actually results in less class time than when it met for a regular period length every day. Oh well. I've been doing the block now for 15 years so I'm used to it and enjoy a big block of time with the students, even if it is every other day.

So we start off by inserting a "mathematical toolkit" onto the inside front cover. (document courtesy of math=love blogger Sarah Hagan).

Then we make a title page. I tell the students they can put whatever they want on this cover page.  I tell them it's a good idea to have the name of the course, the year, my name and their name. But they can put extra stuff there too (when it meets, what our school is) and decorate it if they want.

The next two page spread has a little syllabus on the left hand page and a table of contents foldable on the right hand page. Whenever we are going to use the notebook in class I write on the board "TOC" with whatever pages and whatever content needs to be filled in the table of contents to correspond to those pages.

Supplies and General Logistics

I also have my students sitting in tables of 5 desks (six tables in all) with usually 4 students per table. Each table is responsible for getting their ISN supplies for the day if they see the TOC note when they come in. This basket has scissors, highlighter, glue sticks and tape in them. They also grab a "glue sponge" box. These are fabulous so far!  My first year using them. I have to make another set of six so each table has two. Check out this glue sponge video.

That's it!  Ready to go!

All the documents referenced here can be found in this folder.