Should You Use Interactive Notebooks in Your Classroom?

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Why should you use interactive notebooks in your classroom?

Click HERE for almost 100 printable interactive notebooks for your classroom.

• Students use both their visual and linguistic intelligences. The left side of the notebooks allows visual learners to use their best medium to explore and share ideas, and encourages nonvisual learners to become more proficient with graphic approaches in a nonthreatening way. Both types of learners will work with their writing skills.

• Note taking becomes an active process. These notebooks invite students to become engaged in their learning. Students will spend some time passively recording ideas from a lecture or the board, but most of their time doing something with ideas-putting them into their own words, searching for implication or assumptions, transforming words into visuals, finding the main point of a political cartoon, etc. This is especially true of the left side of the notebook, which is reserved for their active exploration of social studies ideas.

• Notebooks help students to systematically organize as they learn. With the teacher’s encouragement, students can used their notebooks to record ideas about every activity they engage in during a unit. Have them use a variety of organization techniques-topic headings, colored highlights, different writing styles-to synthesize historical concepts and make coherence of what they learn. The notebook permits assignments to be kept together in a regular place and in logical order.

• Notebooks become a portfolio on individual learning. These personal, creative notebooks become a record of each student’s growth. The teacher, students, and even parents can review a student’s progress in writing, illustrating, recording, thinking, and organization skills.

For more ideas, go here: Classroom Articles: Interactive Notebooks

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Click HERE to see our best selling interactive notebooks in our TpT store.

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Here is a FREE plants interactive science notebook to get you started.

Your elementary and special education students will love this printable hands-on craftivity. The students will color and cut out a "lift the flaps" book and attach it to their interactive notebooks. Two sets of plant part descriptions are provided. One set is for novice learners, and the other set is more descriptive. Students can cut and paste the descriptions under the correct plant part, or they can write their own description.

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You may also like these resources from our Amazon Associate store:

Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning, 4th Edition

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Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners: How to Scaffold Content for Academic Success

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Teaching Science with Interactive Notebooks

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Shelly Anton is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. ** This means there are Amazon affiliate links in these blog posts. This does not mean you pay a dime more when you purchase a product through the link. It just means I am trying to save you valuable teacher time by making it easier for you to find great resources for your students, and I earn a few cents for my research and time. Thank you for all you do for kids!