I really love doing unit studies with my kids. I love them because my kids choose what they want to learn about and then we set out to learn about it together. We are all learning something new and it is fun. One of my most favorite tools I used when teaching high school science was something we called an Interactive Notebook. Using an interactive notebook with unit studies is a great strategy to help my students connect with what they were learning. It can help in creating a portfolio of content that they could look back on. I found so many of them found great pride in their notebooks because it cataloged everything they had accomplished in the class. I love these notebooks so much I brought the idea home with me and use them with my own kids today in our homeschool.
What is an Interactive Notebook?
An Interactive Notebook is essentially a spiral bound or composition notebook that catalogs and collects what the student is currently learning. But it really isn’t that basic. In an Interactive Notebook your goal is to connect content meaningfully and generate application between what they are reading/listening to and moving it into understanding. It is all about helping students make connections. It plays into an old idea of the right and left brain. It is the idea that the right side of our brain is our analytical side and the left side is our creative side. This idea of the right and left brain is overly simplistic and not really supported by science, but I think it is still useful. It helps us understand what it means to make a connection between what content is coming in and how I output information to demonstrate understanding. In the notebook the left pages are dedicated to your creative output of what you just learned and the right side is the input of what you are learning. Besides the concept of input and output, I think the greatest goal to keep in mind is that we are creating a portfolio for your kids to proudly display what they have learned and hope they share it with others. Why does it matter to me that they share it with others? When kids share what they are learning with others it shows that they are developing understanding of something and have confidence to teach someone else. When your kids are doing that, then you need to hold your own personal “hallelujah” party because what they are learning is coming to life!
Setting up an Interactive Notebook
Setting up your interactive notebook is super easy and a great thing to have your kids do with you. It creates great buy in and helps them make it their own. Remember our goal is to create pride in displaying what they are learning, so they want to share it with others. One thing to consider when buying your notebooks is to establish what you will be putting in the notebooks. For example if you plan to do a lot of cutting out/taping/gluing items in, or you plan on just writing or drawing on the pages you have, a composition notebook is fine. They are nice because they are small and they can come with graph paper or lined, and many teachers love them.
If you want the freedom to put full printer paper into your notebook and not have to always cut and size things down, then I recommend going with a spiral notebook. Not all spiral notebooks are the same. You want to get a notebook that a full printer sized paper page can be taped in without cutting. The other thing that is kind of great with spiral notebooks is that you can get your kiddos favorite color (buy in!). Staples has a brand called ACCEL that are perfect. Some of the Five Star notebooks work as well. Find what you like.
Here are some notebooks that would work from Amazon. When you are buying a spiral notebook, check the size to ensure it is 8.5"x11". Most typical spirals are 8.5"x10.5" which means you will need to cut printouts.
After you get your notebooks, number the pages of your notebook. We will use these numbers to catalogue what is in your notebook on your table of contents. The next thing I do is have my kids decorate their notebooks. For my elementary age kids they designed their own front cover on the first page of their notebook. My kids and I call them our WonderBooks. They made their own front page and drew whatever they wanted. For my high school or middle schooler I would give them a sharpie and let them decorate the front cover. Some of my high schoolers loved this and some really didn’t want to cover their beautiful favorite color with anything. Let them do what they want, it is their notebook. The next part of the notebook set up is your table of contents, one pager, and the right/left pages.
Table of Contents
There are lots of ways to do this and I think depending on your kids' ages you can modify it to them.
You might want the table of contents to be more detailed to list what is on each page or maybe you want to have something more general where you list the numbers that are connected to your unit.
I think this can look different depending on what is important to you. I tape this on the inside front cover of our notebook, for my high school students it was on the first two pages that are next to each other in their notebook. Do what makes sense to you.
One Pager
This idea came from a friend of mine that I taught with for several years. It is basically a title page for your unit. It is the right page that is the first right page of the unit. You can include all kinds of things on the one pager. You can decide what is important to you, what your kids like to do and what is reasonable to ask for based on their ages. For my kids they have to include their unit question, title, at least 3 pictures, a creative border, and important vocab words. Other ideas depending on your kids age and interest could be a unit summary, a graphic organizer, a fun unit poem, or important unit questions. For my kids we also use the left page in our one pager set up. On the left page they include new vocab and a unit summary. Find what your kids can do and are excited about and include it. The way I use the one pager is, I have them add something to the one pager each time we learn something. The one pager for us comes together all along the way, we build it as we go. They then do the summary at the end of the unit. You can also use the one pager as a summative task. You can have your kids create the one pager at the end and decide then what they would include and use it as a summative demonstration of what they learned. Do you:). Find what works best for your kids. You can always change it as you go.
Right and Left Pages
In your notebook you have one page on the left and one page on the right. What we put on these pages is consistent with input and output.
The right page of your notebook is your input. Input is the content of what you are learning. It can be notes you take, it can be content you wrote down from a movie, it can be a worksheet that you are working through. It is anything where information is being given to you. For my kids their right page has to include the lesson title and the lesson question we are asking. We create a unit question for the whole unit and each lesson has its own questions. You can change that to an objective or an essential learning statement, or nothing. You can include or not include whatever you want.
The left page on the other hand is your output. This is a creative demonstration of what you learned. Left pages can be anything, it can be a poem, a diagram, a graphic organizer, a map, a timeline, a picture…you get the point. You can set this up a couple of ways. You can be open ended, where you ask them to create whatever they want. For example if you have a lesson about the organization of the body, ask your kids to do something on the left page that shows what they learned. They come up with whatever. But what I find works the best is when I give them a prompt and they make something from it. For example my kids and I did a lesson about the immune system. For their left page I asked them to make each of the three types of cells we learned about it into cartoon characters. They gave them speech bubbles, costumes, and labeled them. For my high school students when we were studying carbon I gave them the prompt to create a campaign poster for Carbon. I told them Carbon was running for office and they were the campaign manager so they needed to explain why carbon is so awesome. What does this do? It converts what you learned into something memorable that moves content from knowledge to understanding. I knew I had a breakthrough when my 8 year old was walking our spazzy little dog Benny with me one day. Tegan turns to me laughing and says, “Benny is ridiculous, he is like a helper T cell, always just hunting for danger.” Insert emoji of brain exploding. He was right! Benny is a helper T cell!
Take what you want and leave what you want
The interactive notebook is just a tool to use for the bigger picture of learning together. It gives us a place to organize what we are learning about and make a portfolio of what we have learned. It is fun to make it your own. I think that is the main point. Make it your own. Take what you love about it and leave what you don’t. You might find that the whole concept doesn’t work for your kids at all. It works so great for us because I find them using humor, creativity, and imagination to convert content into application. Who knows you might love it too and maybe one day your kid too will see helper T cells in their everyday life.
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