Are you seeing the signs? Then, check out these ten signs you need to use an interactive notebook in your classroom and how to get started!
1. Your Students Are Bored
Do you look out into your classroom to bored faces? Worry no more, an interactive notebook can help!
Picture this, with students busily personalizing their notes, completing graphic organizers, and analyzing their learning they will be more active participants!
2. You Need a Way to Differentiate Notes
Traditional note taking isn’t for everyone, in fact, is works for almost no one.
Instead, an interactive notebook will help you and your students to each complete learning at their own level while creating a similar product.
3. What You Are Doing Isn’t Working
You have tried your hand at something new, but it just isn’t working and it’s time to move on.
For instance, when you have filled what feels like spirals full of notes and the learning isn’t sticking, it’s time.
4. Lack of Organization Without an Interactive Notebook
Do your students notebooks look like they went through a windstorm? INBs work to help students organize learning by unit making them easy to refer back to.
5. Information is Getting Lost
For example, when I think of pages of traditional notes I get anxious thinking about trying to find a certain fact or detail. This doesn’t happen in an interactive notebook because of the way information is organized.
6. Families Are Asking What Students Are Learning
So often, families want to feel a connection to what students are learning, and INBs can help!
Sending home students with their interactive notebook is a great way to share with families what students are learning. My students loved to challenge their family and friends by quizzing them over information they had included.
7. Students Aren’t Connecting with the Information
Does is seem like information is going in one ear and out the other without being processed? An interactive notebook is a valuable way to stop information along the learning path and allow it to simmer and permeate thinking.
8. Students Don’t Remember Learning
How many times has a student said to you, “You never taught us that!”
With an interactive notebook, you simply have students turn to the page with the information and review the learning.
9. Students Don’t Have Ownership
Regular old notes don’t give students the opportunity to personalize their notes in a meaningful way. INBs allow students to use different strategies including sketch notes to make them their own.
The REAL magic happens in the output though, where students use their critical thinking skills to really connect to and analyze their learning.
10. You Always Wanted to Try an Interactive Notebook
Most of all, you have probably heard about INBs and have been wanting to try them. Now’s your chance!
Get Yourself an Interactive Notebook Today!
Get ready to start an interactive notebook in your classroom! I have both U.S. History and Texas History INB Template Kits waiting for you.
Within these kits, each unit has a set of activities. Each activity comes in three versions to provide easy differentiation and is followed up by sample journaling questions to get your output ideas flowing!
