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

Semi-Surprise?!?!?!

Well, all good things come to those who wait, right?  My grandfather used to always say "weight is what broke the wagon."  And that is kind of what has happened, waiting for the dust to settle at school has my teaching assignment for the upcoming school year changed yet again - or my joy wagon broken, but only partly. 
When I left school in early June, I would be teaching four science classes.  Then a couple of weeks ago because of my AIG certification, I would now be teaching one language arts class and three science classes.  I can say I wasn't mad about that.

As of yesterday, I will now be teaching two language arts classes and two science classes.  At first, I can honestly say I was slightly disappointed but after some reflecting, realized it was a GREAT plan.

I will be on a four person team with three other AWESOME teachers and because of the certification of two of us, we have worked out a(n) great amazing schedule for our kiddos - kiddos that I love and am very excited to be looping up to 7th grade. The other teacher and I will both teach two language arts classes and two science classes.  We will both be teaching language arts our first two blocks and science our last two blocks - meaning all of our students will be taught language arts before lunch!  This is like a dream to me (us) since they will be fresh in the mornings. 

Yay to the school year starting out on a good note and for a fabulous team that has been assembled.  And the best part, school hasn't even started and we are all working together and in the best interest of our students. 

Explains it all right now!

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. 

Really?

Really?  That has become our new catch phrase in my class this year.  I suppose it is inevitable since I use that word often all of the time.  I just have to shake my head and laugh about it when I hear a student say it.  At this point in the year, I honestly do not even have a chance to get the word in my brain before one of my students have already uttered it in some sarcastic tone.  I am so glad that they "get" me and my humor - that was a concern when I moved from 7th grade to 6th grade this year (actually not by me, but by a fellow 6th grade teacher).  I did not let it bother me very much, she is a newer teacher and I HAVE taught 2nd and 5th grades prior to middle school.

Anyway, I am going to share one funny from my class right before spring break before I post some more interactive notebook pictures.  I hope you are ready for it...it IS epic and was a proud moment for the sarcastic teacher that I am.

Let me set the stage...I had a female student who was leaving about 1/2 hour early.  We were dismissing at noon that day (and it was my birthday).  Names have been changed to protect the innocent. 

John (boy student):  Sally, please take me with you.
Sally (girl student):  Sorry John, I didn't bring my leash today.
Me:  Laughing out Loud in the back of the room (with the rest of the class) and issuing a proud fist pump or two.

Ok, so now on to more interactive notebooks.  Have I mentioned how much I love these things?  They really have helped keep me focused and centered this year.  I really wish someone would write a book about them to be used in a language arts classroom.

This is a foldable we created on Knots in My Yo-yo String by Jerry Spinelli.  It is from a Dinah Zike book called Notebooking Central Notebook Foldables Strategies for Comprehending and Interacting with Informational Text.

This is just a practice paragraph where each student wrote their own, but the neat thing is the sticky note at the bottom.  I figured out how to print on a couple different sizes of sticky notes.  Each student was given a sticky note to use to check their paragraphs.  Love these!!

This is a window foldable that was created using another Dinah Zike book, Notebook Foldables for Spirals, Binders, & Composition Books.  This was on changing singular nouns to plurals.

This is just a summarization page from out notebooks.  We worked on different summarization strategies for students to use.

Another summarization strategy glued into our notebooks taken from our SIOP training.

And here is another foldable from Dinah Zike for students to use for summarizing.  In addition, I found a story pyramid summary that students can use in their summarization efforts.

 Hope this post has not completely bored you to death.  Stay tuned for more pictures...and details on an AWESOME find that I well...found...to help make students notebooks just a little more organized.  Did I mention how much I LOVE being organized???

Interactive Notebooks - Again

We have been busy this week reading a novel and have been using our social studies interactive notebooks so I have neglected my language arts one this week.  Have I mentioned that I love my interactive notebooks and truly believe that my students are happy to have such a structured approach to learning.  AND...that they have a valuable resource to refer back to when needed.  I also love the fact that pages are not falling out of their notebooks or have just simply disappeared (those are some of the problems I had when using binders and having students place notes in these binders). 

I am a very visual learner, so I am going to include a few more pictures in this short but sweet post.  I am reminded of an acronym I have been using with my students when working on summarizing...KISS It!  Keep It Short and Simple.  I learned of this acronym when I did a stint for AT&T before landing a real teaching job. 

No laughing at my horrible artwork please...it is the content we are interested in viewing!

This is a notes page about the Elements of a Short Story...notice how each page is titled and dated. We start off day one and number each page. Each time we complete an entry in our notebooks, the date and title are entered as well.

This is a Sensory Figure I found at Mrs. Gannon's Wordpress site.  She has a bunch of pages dedicated to interactive notebooks and social studies.  Remember...I am not an artist! I put many things like this in my notebook so my students can refer back to them as needed throughout the school year.  After discovering Pinterest, I realized these would be considered types of anchor charts.

This is a foldable created using the 12 Powerful Words.  This is a list of words that occur most often on student questions, especially test.  I tried to get a picture of a couple of the tabs lifted where you can see the word on top and the definition is under that flap.

This is a list of sample character traits I found and we glued in our notebooks.  This is a great "thinking started" for students when they are stumped.  My students probably refer back to this page more than any other in their notebook. 

This is just a set of questions related to the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros.  I found this idea somewhere on the web to create the questions in a strip that were glued to the side of the page (can be either on the left or right - on the right here so it doesn't cover up the holes of the notebook page).  Students were required to answer the questions in a complete sentence - this is the page where I modeled that expectation.

This just shows a page where we took notes (8 Ways Characters are Revealed) and we still had 1/2 a page leftover.  So...at some point we needed to add a list of common helping verbs in their notebook.  Why waste space, right?  We just cut the longer list in half and glued it to this "free" space in our notebooks.

Just some notes on theme, but wanted to show that when mistakes are made, we just cross them out and keep on rolling. 

Just a horrible graphic organizer where students were telling about different aspects of their life.  This was in conjunction with reading Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli.  This is his autobiography.

This is a close activity on the Elements of Autobiography.  It is a good idea, but is too crowded.  Next year, this will be divided into two pages and have more room for students to write.  This was created during the whole left side reflection/right side input side.  Like I reported in an earlier post, I scrapped that idea and just use the next available page - what a great revelation this was for me!

Logistics of Interactive Notebooks

After reading all of the information available online about interactive notebooks, I gave them a shot a couple of years ago.  The concept made sense to me, but some of the rules did not.  My first year I tried the left/right scenario where teacher input was on the right and student input was on the left.  That honestly did not make sense to me, but we made it that first year with that concept.  Last year, I did the same left/right set-up, but I switch it to make more sense in my little brain.  The left side was for learning and the right side was for reflecting.  In my small world classroom, that made more sense to me.

I still struggled keeping students on the same page since some students write bigger or smaller than others and some had college ruled notebooks while others had wide ruled notebooks (next year, I am requesting all college ruled).  I went to the NC Middle School Conference (my team won Region 6 Team of the Year) and attended an interactive notebook session for science.  I know I don't teach science, but was hoping to get some goodies to convert for language arts.  It was like EUREKA because I came away with one little tidbit of information that completely changed my frustration level with keeping students on the same page.  How? you may ask:  students tape/glue in an extra sheet of paper on the page where they are working somehow if they run out of space devoted to a particular assignment.  It was GENIUS. 

Then this year, I scrapped the whole left/right side idea and we just use the next available page for whatever we want to put in our notebooks.  This process has worked so much better for us this year.  I make a conscious effort to keep pages together so students can see lessons/notes laid out next to their reflections they are creating.  We still add extra pages if needed when I devote 2 pages to notes/ideas and it takes them 3 or more.  Sometimes, I even have to add extra pages in my own notebook as I wrote bigger than expected or did not plan enough pages in the beginning.  This just allows for modeling and for students to see that it is okay to add more pages if necessary.


Below is a notes page on plot from my teacher notebook.  

 Another page of notes from my teacher notebook below. 

Below is a picture of my teacher notebook where we were taking genre notes.  You can see where I ran out of room on my two allotted pages and attached another page with tape to extend our working area. This is taped so that it folds into the notebook (from the far right toward the spiral spine).   

Interactive Notebooks in Language Arts

I went in to school today for a couple of hours and took several pictures of my teacher interactive notebook that I use in my language arts classes.  I have not found a specific website to use interactive notebooks in language arts.  I read any and all information that I could find online before I started using them in my own classroom.  I have modified them from their original setup to fit my own style of teaching. 

I guess I should start at the beginning.  Much debate has been done about what type of notebook to use.  I prefer a one subject spiral bound notebook with a poly cover, 100 sheets, college ruled, with a pocket in the front.  Other people prefer to use a composition notebook or a binder.  I have found with a binder that pages tend to get lost no matter how careful you are about putting items in the notebook.  With a composition notebook, the pages do not fall out, but space is limited.  I have only had one or two pages fall out over the years and we just tape to the next page - problem solved. 

My notebook of choice is from Staples.  It is the Accel brand.  They can be found on sale during the school year and especially during the summer for $2.00 each.  The Mead Five Star ones work and are similarily priced.  I like the Staples ones better because it has a clear poly folder in the front and a thicker spiral that does not get snagged on stuff.

Here is a picture of my choice notebook and a link to them at Staples.  But...make sure they ARE on sale!  Click on the notebook to find them at your local Staples.

Here is part of the table of contents page in our interactive notebook.

Langage Arts and Interactive Notebooks

I created a post-it note poster to use for students to understand the concept of a new word.  I put our headings packet on www.teacherspayteachers.com.  Since this is my first addition to TpT, it is free.  I hope to add other things to TpT focusing on using interactive notebooks in language arts.  There are many things out there for science, social studies, and math; but have not found many notebook ready/worthy ideas for language arts/reading.

Watch this blog for future updates about using interactive notebooks in language arts classes.  Since discovering the concept online a couple of years ago, it has become my best friend.  I love how organized the notebook keeps students and they all of their resources at their fingertips.  This is especially important as we move to Common Core for language arts and Essential Standards for social studies (I teach in NC) without the slightest hint of getting any new resources.  Since this is my first year EVER teaching social studies, the interactive notebook is a great place to resources for students to refer throughout the year. I think I should invest some of my money in glue stick stock...since we use it almost daily!

Watch for future updates with pictures from our language arts interactive notebooks.