[hvlawson]

I'm teaching Science in 5th Grade this year and would love to use interactive student notebooks. Can anyone give advice on how to set up the notebooks and what has worked well with your students?

[maggiehgs]

If you click on "Search Boards" up in the left hand corner, you can put in "Interactive Notebooks" and come up with quite a few threads on the subject.

Here are a couple of threads that offer a bunch of informational links:
http://www.proteacher.net/discussion...ad.php?t=10082
http://www.proteacher.net/discussion...ad.php?t=85870

I'm wanting to do it this year, too!

I was thinking of doing it just in one subject... Science or Social Studies... to get my feet wet. But I wonder if I shouldn't do it in both because I only do one subject at a time... A unit of Social Studies... then a unit of Science... so it wouldn't be two notebooks going at once. Hmmmm.... (Sorry, thinking out loud here!)

[bparsons]

Just use a composition book. You can do some kind of warm up to begin each lesson - something they should have remembered from last time, or some kind of prediction or the K on a KWL.

Then, leave room to glue in notes or directions for a lab. Kids can illustrate to show what they observed. They can glue in sections of graph paper for graphing their data.

Add the end of each lesson, have a couple of questions from your state test to sum thing up and to make sure they got the point. I was told that kids should not only choose the right answer, but explain why the others are wrong. They can do this alone first, and then discuss it with a partner.

You can also have a vocabulary section that they illustrate as their own "picture dictionary" and/or their own illustrated set of informational mini-charts (water cycle, rock cycle, etc.) Add interest by making it "lift the flap".

[teachva]

I am going to be using an ISN for Science this year. I purchased pre written notes from IRN Corp. They have created all the notes linked to the Viriginia SOLs.

http://www.irncorp.com

I tried this strategy a few years ago and was overwhelmed created all the note pages. The notes are a little pricy, but I think it is worth the time savings for me. They do not have samples on their website, but I reeived mine and they look great. Each page of notes also has a teachers guide with what the kids should be doing to the page, and questions to deepen their comprehension.

I plan to use these notes with other labs to reinforce the material.