Interactive Student Notebook...finally!

I finally managed to remember to snap some photos of my Interactive Students Notebook (ISN) today while I was up at school making copies and getting ready for the week. Several of you have asked questions about how I use them in my classroom, so hopefully this will answer most of them. :)

I first decided to implement Interactive Notebooks in the middle of the fall semester during my first year of teaching. I knew what I was doing was not working and I was not loving the binder that was requested on the school supply list. During one of my Saturday grad school classes last fall, we were lucky enough to have a presentation from one of the ladies that worked at the Dinah Zike Academy. (If you didn't already know, Dinah is pretty much the queen of foldables!) I know this was exactly what my 6th graders needed, so I went with it an ran. Last fall it was a big learning process, but I felt great about how my notebooks went in the spring. Now I think I finally have the hang of it and love how the ISN is evolving in my classroom. 

This school year we completely did away with a binder in 6th grade and most of our learning is placed into our ISN that lives in the classroom. The only time my students are allowed to take the ISN home is when they need to study notes or activities out of it that we are going to be tested on. I just know that if I allowed my students to keep their notebooks in their backpacks or lockers, they would not make it to class every day.

So now what you have been waiting for, pictures and details about the ISN and how it works in my classroom.

 The first thing that you will find when you open up an ISN from room 117 is the Table of Contents. It is hard to believe, but we are already on page 2 for the year. The first page is glued all the way down to the notebook page, but then each one after that is only glued down where it says Table of Contents which allows us the ability to look underneath it in the future to see what all we have done.

 Next is an individual word wall. Sorry that it is sideways. There is a box for each letter, A-Z, and this is a place in the ISN where students can write words that they misspell when we are writing.
I think it is so important for students to have a place to keep up with things like this.

The next few pages are composed of some essentials that live in our ISN all year long. These are things like a reading log, reading interest survey, a book waiting list, genre overview, writing survey, and a reading response letter format.In my classroom starting the 2nd 6 weeks, students will be expected to write a reading response letter each Friday based on their independent reading book. This is one of my favorite things that we do in our notebook because I love seeing how my students connect with their books.

 Since we do not keep a binder, we take all of our notes inside of our ISN. Here is an example of one of the first things that we did this school year. We were learning about different word parts such as root, base word, prefix, suffix, and affix. I really liked how this particular note taking strategy worked out, and we will be doing them in a table form like this many more times this school year.

These notes booklets are something new that I am trying this year and so far so great! It does not take much for notes to get boring so I have started to create my notes in the form of books that we can put together and then glue into our notebooks. I have already made some more for our plot notes as well as notes that we will be taking on questioning. I am hoping that these will be something that I can share in my TpT shop.

I am a huge fan of teaching roots, prefixes, and suffixes to my 6th graders. One way that I have been doing this is by using Teach Root Words All Year Long from Fancy Free in Fourth Grade. I have loved it and so have my kiddos. Most of the time we will use this as a warm-up, but I love placing them in our ISN so we can reference them throughout the year.

We also use lots of foldables in our notebooks. This one came from the fabulous Dinah Zike and one of her many books that she has published.

I absolutely love chunking the content for my students through the use of foldables. I have been amazed at the results I have gotten from using these.

I am hoping to start doing a weekly post that shares with you all what we did in our notebooks that week or at least blogging about that once a month. Hopefully that answered some of the questions that you all had, but if you still have one, be sure and ask it!