Experimenting with Interactive Science Notebooks

One teaching/learning strategy I am exploring more this year is the creation of interactive notebooks with my students.  Like blogging, it is another idea that I have known about for a while, but did not commit to really pursue until this school year.  It is a logical fit to the work I have been doing in my class around assessment practices.  Being in a brand new school, it is an excellent opportunity to take this journey with my students.   I am interested to see if the incorporation of interactive notebooks helps to deepen my students’ understanding of the concepts.  I also am excited to use them as another source of evidence when assessing their understanding of the essential learnings. 

I started out small, working on a flip chart of process skills with my grade sevens.    We started by  discussing the scientific method, exploring their prior knowledge, working through some examples and activities with the Smartboad, and, of course, watching Scientific Method on Brainpop. We then did a quick little finger of five to check what they thought they knew- what their confidence level was.  Often, I find my students think they know more than they actually do at first.  I then hammed it up and did a terrible experiment in for the students and had them pick out what was wrong.  They love to point out all of my mistakes!  We had a terrific conversation through this process.  From that, we then moved on to the creation of their flip charts for their binders.  My parameters were a definition of the stage in their own words then pictures/examples that helped them understand and remember.  I was pleased with the end results and watching the students work really showed me who  needed extra support/ clarification and who did not. 

The students who struggled with the task initially asked me to just tell them the answers to write down.  We have lots of work to do on teaching them how to make meaning themselves instead of copying words in thier notebooks.  We’ll see how it goes!

Here are some samples from our study of the 3 classifications of structures... Not bad for students and teacher learning how to do interactive notebooks for the first time1