Nonfiction in Science

Wow, I cannot believe that it has been two months since I have last blogged.  This school year has been one of the most hectic and stressed that I can remember.  I hope that this feeling of being completely overwhelmed soon disappears!  Anyway, enough of the whining and onward to using nonfiction in science.

I am currently teaching two AIG (gifted) language arts classes, one standard science class, and one inclusion science science.  I am thoroughly loving it all, just hoping that I am doing all four groups justice.

Since my background has mostly been language arts in  middle school, my strengths lie there.  I think that science is the perfect place to teach those nonfiction text features and structures. 

In North Carolina in 7th grade, we teach weather and climate.  My inclusion class was struggling with the concepts associated with the topic. As I was meandering through the picture book section of Barnes and Noble, I stumbled across the book Climate Change by Peter Benoit.  As I sat (yes, in the kiddy section of Barnes and Noble) and read this book to see if it was something I could use, I had many ideas running through my head.  I bought the five copies they had on the shelf and had them order me three more so that my students could work in groups of fours. 

The book is written with several different text structures:  cause/effect, problem/solution, question/answer, and description.  Along with finding these text structures, it had many of the nonfiction text features we have been studying.  Students used their copies of the nonfiction text features cards created by Beth Newingham to identify the parts of the text to make reading it a little easier. 

For one section, students were given enough sticky notes so they would have three per subheading.  While reading each section, students were required to write in their own words three facts/ideas/pieces of information, one per each sticky note. 

Students really enjoyed this activity and seemed to actually learn the information they discovered while reading the book.  I was pleasantly surprised at how well they did with this activity and how much information they retained after reading. 

As you can see in the pictures below, there are three other adults in the room with this class.  There are an inclusion teacher, a student intern, a one-on-one assistant for two of my autistic students, and myself with 24 students.  Even with that many adults in the room, we feel wiped-out and unsure of any progress after working with that class each day. 



Climate Change by Peter Benoit

Students working on reading and taking notes on their sticky notes in their interactive notebooks.

More note taking...



Intern working with a group of students.

Another groups of students using sticky notes to take notes in their interactive notebooks.

Inclusion teacher working with a group of students reading Climate  Change.

One-on-one assistant working with two of our autistic students.

My group of girls working together to take notes and understand our climate. 



Enjoy and hopefully it won't be another two months until the next post.

Randy

ISN - Links and More

This post is way overdue and I must admit should have probably been one of the first that I posted to help everyone understand my journey with interactive notebooks in language arts.  As I have said in the past, there were not many resources available at the beginning of my journey with using interactive notebooks in language arts classes.  So...I relied on one of my great friends, Google, to help me search and search and search (you get the picture).  What I did find were many sites and bits of information about using ISNs in social studies, science, and even math.  Being the creative thieving teacher that I am, I took what information I could find and "made it fit" my needs.

I had saved several of these informative sites to my favorites on my computer.  Some of the links still work while some can no longer be found.  Anyway, I did a quick Google search and found a few more sites that I felt had information that could be used to help understand ISNs and also help someone considering using ISNs in their classroom make an informed decision.  I also snapped a few pictures of the Dinah Zike foldables books that I have used in my ISNs over the past couple of years.

One thing that I recommend you do if using ISNs is that you create a teacher notebook as you go through the school year...completing pages/assignments as students do.  This helps to keep everyone on the same page and you have a great record of what students need to do when they are absent.  They can grab your notebook and use it to get caught up and have a guide for where to glue pages and what was missed.  I would also suggest that you create a separate notebook for each class that you teach.  Modeling for each class is so much easier if you just start over instead of showing them your notebook from the previous class. 

Click on the goldish words below to visit that web page.  You may have to do a little searching on that page to find the information related to interactive notebooks - I tried to point you to the main page of each site.  Each foldables book is linked to the book at the Dinah Zike store, just click the picture and it will take you to that specific store page.

History Alive (the birth of interactive notebooks)
Interactive Notebooks (a wiki-space with many logistics)
A Teacher's Treasure (Mor Zrihen's blog all about ineractive notebooks)
Mr. Roughton 2.0 (many assignments that can be adapted for ISN use)
Mrs. Campbell
Stirling English
Mrs. Edwards
Ms. Perez
Science Notebooking
Middle School Science
Teaching Social Studies (this is one of my favorites with very useful info by Mrs. Gannon)
Huff English
Joseph Hill (just found this one today...a new favorite with TONS of info)
EHOW (quick tutorial)
Setting up the Interactive Notebook (Slideshare powerpoint)

Click on the picture to go to the Dinah Zike store for more information about this book. 

Click on the picture to go to the Dinah Zike store for more information about this book.

Click on the picture to go to the  Dinah Zike store for more information on this book.

Click on the picture to go to the Dinah Zike store for more information on this book.

Click on the picture to go to the Dinah Zike store for more information about this book.

I hope all of this information is helpful.  Good luck with your interactive notebook journey.  I will try to answer any questions that I can, if possible.

Randy

More on My Social Studies Interactive Notebook

This post includes more pictures of my social studies interactive notebooks we have used this school year.  You will see most of the information in this post are foldables from Dinah Zike and mine is lacking color like the students. 

Global grid system notes

Maps versus globes Venn diagram

Parts of a map foldable

Vocabulary to accompany our textbook

Landforms found above and below sea level foldable

Types of landforms foldable

Cornell notes on South America from our textbook

This is a bad copy of the foldables notebook I used. Hope this helps all of those who were wondering where the book came from and what it looked like.

Inside my Social Studies Interactive Notebook

Some had mentioned they would like to see inside my social studies interactive notebook so I finally remembered to bring it home and snap some pictures.  It is not as creative as my language arts one!  I used some foldables from Dinah Zike, some I found online, and some great units from InspirEd Educators. 

This is my first year teaching social studies (in middle school, in my career, and in 6th grade).  I teach in NC and our state will be implementing the Common Core starting next school (2012-2013).  In addition, all of our other curriculums have changed to what they call Essential  Standards.  I was put on the Social Studies Essential Standards training team for our county. 

Needless to say, I was panicked and lost at the beginning of the school year.  I started out with the five themes of geography and landforms and then moved to South America which was found in our old textbook while we read The Cay in language arts class.  Since being put on the training team, the team was told after the first nine weeks that we were allowed encouraged to convert to the new essential standards curriculum.  With that came a complete loss for me.  I had no social studies materials to start with, but the change meant I had absolutely nothing, not even the old textbook.  I headed to the Internet to search for materials, lessons, actually anything I could get my hands on and discovered InspirED Educators. 

InspirEd Educators was like this amazing find for me (and in no way am I affiliated or paid to promote their products)!  They have several thematic units on ancient world history which is what our new essential standards is for 6th grade.  These lessons contain a variety of hands on activities, primary and secondary sources, whole group/small group lessons, research projects, and collaborative projects just to name a few. 

So...long story short:  my social studies notebooks started out more interactive but then became a place to glue all the lesson from InspirEd Educators as act as a textbook for social studies.  Here are a few pictures to get started.

The table of contents for my social studies interactive notebook.

Five Themes of Geography flip book foldable.  We took notes on each tab for that theme.  Notice the capital/bold letters spell MR. HELP...this was our acronym to help remember the five themes (found on the Internet somewhere).

One of the tabs from our Five Themes of Geography flip book foldable.

Longitude and latitude foldable using a paper plate and then glued into our notebooks.

Here is the paper plate foldable unfolded in our notebook.

Interactive Notebooks - Yet Again

I am determined to get ALL of the pictures I took a few weeks ago of my language arts interactive notebook before the end of school!  I hope to actually get it done faster than that.  I have a few other things I want to blog about before the end of the school year.  Seriously, this is the last set of pictures I have from a few weeks ago.  Any new ones will be newer pictures taken recently.
Here are some more pictures of various activities that we have included in our interactive notebooks so far this year.

Parts of an Essay from a freebie activity on www.teacherspayteachers.com.  Students had to put the "blown-up" parts together in a sensible way.  If you haven't checked out TpT, you should do it NOW!  It is full of ideas, units, lessons, activities, etc. created BY teachers and when you make a purchase, that teacher gets the profit.  This activity was a FREEBIE from that site!

Text connections (remember I am NOT an artist!)

Concept of definition/word map

Point of View foldable created from a Dinah Zike template.

Character Feelings anchor chart - found on pinterest!

Character Traits anchor chart - another pinterest find!

Characterization anchor chart - yes, pinterest again!

Inferencing anchor chart- yep, you guessed it...another pinterest score!

Author's Purpose anchor chart - this one is actually my idea.  Students added color to the ones in their notebooks.

Nonfiction text STRUCTURES, not to be confused with nonfiction text features.  I had no idea this phrase/idea existed until I ordered the wrong book.  It was a very educational mistake and I am glad that I did not completely read the title of the book before I ordered it!

More on nonfiction text STRUCTURES.

A really fun inferecing lab using white mystery airheads.  Bought the original packet on TpT, but then redesigned it into a foldable for our notebooks.  It was frustrating in the beginning, but quite an accomplishment when finished - now I know I can do it for many other things!

More on Interactive Notebooks

I am going to post a few more pictures of my language arts interactive notebook that I took a couple of weeks ago.  I have been posting a few with each blog, but am going to post several more of them on this entry.   It has been what seems like a long week, so I am going to KISS this post!  That is an acronym I teach my students:  Keep It Short and Simple.  We KISS a lot of stuff when appropriate!


This is a double bubble map we used while reading The Cay by Theodore Taylor.

This is a summarization strategy I found online call "the incredible shrinking notes" where students start out writing a summary of a reading selection on the large index card.  Students are then given the medium sized card and have to take the information from the large card and condense it onto the medium sized card.  Finally, students are given the small card and must then take the information from the medium sized card and condense it down either further onto the small card.  This is a great way for students to get to the main point/idea of a selection.

This is a brief biography of Theodore Taylor we glued in our notebooks when we were reading The Cay, one of his awesome books that can be integrated into either the study of South America or Central America or World War II.  It also has great examples of dialect.

This is a foldable on poetry terms.

Notes on figurative language with some color coding to make the notes user friendly.

Poetry notes also color coded to make them easier to use and more helpful.

More poetry notes...notice an example is created with each type of poem so students have a reference point to refer to when needed.  Once I teach poetry, it is fair game to require students to respond to any type of reading in poetry form.  I teach poetry between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year, which gives students an opportunity to use their poetry skills for the whole second semester.

Another page of poetry notes.

Our last page of poetry notes.  Note the "I Am" poem rules taped into student notebooks and then our class example written underneath. 

We used "Winter Morning Poem" and a sheet of generic poetry analysis questions to aid in comprehension.  The questions are taped into the notebook so when students open them, they can see both poem and questions/answers together.

This is just another poem where we were marking the rhyme scheme, lines, and stanzas. 

Awesomeness with a Punch...

A crafty friend of mine made my day when she told me she had a Stampin' Up Round Tab punch that she would sell me!  Sounds crazy, right?  Well...I am quite an organizational nerd and saw a notebook on pinterest (enough said about that) with these cool colored index tabs used in a notebook.  It was like love at first sight and upon digging a little into the "pin" as one must do, I found that these awesome tabs were created with a punch (much like a hole puncher).  So then my mission became finding one.  I checked the Stampin' Up webpage and eBay, but before ordering from either place I put a plea out on facebook.  I knew I had many crafty friends and one responded willing to part with her punch...so now that bad boy is MINE and I am so very excited about it.  I know it is weird or crazy or even uncool to be this excited over an index tab, but I just can't help it - it is one more way for me to help my students get organized. 

Here is my teacher interactive notebook for social studies.  And to the right of my notebook is pure awesomeness in a small little punch.  You can see the shape it makes and then it is folded in half, with a page glued/sandwiched between it, and then labeled.  Like magic, we have the coolest index tabs for our notebooks with little cost.  I have 27 students in each of my classes and was able to punch enough tabs from ONE sheet of cardstock for the entire class!  I think that is just pure genius!

This is just a picture of my amazing punch turned upside down.

My notebook with a close-up of the index tabs in place and labeled.  I am not the best photgrapher, but my phone takes much better pictures than my digital camera.

Student notebooks for social studies with their index tabs in place.  Many of them wouldn't admit it, because it is so uncool, but they pretty much thought these tabs were pretty much as EPIC as I did!