We are four weeks into school and schedules are finally settled to a manageable level and I have finally been able to start on the interactive science notebooks. I was not about to hand out those babies only to have the kids transferred out of my class and take their notebooks with them. I do not know how all of you other teachers do it with the notebooks. This is my first year trying interactive notebooks and I teach what I like to believe are functioning human beings that should be able to follow basic instructions. OMG! After going over a power point on the purpose of the notebooks including explaining left side/right side, grading, and showing them examples of other notebooks from the web we began...
Assignment 1: Students were given at least 20 minutes in class after writing down the instruction below and then two nights to complete it.
- number all the pages in the notebook, front and back 1-140 in pencil.
- Glue the rubric to the inside of the front cover
- Glue a cover page to page 1
- Glue an about the author page to page 2
- Glue an output ideas page to page 3
- Glue a list of "Big Money Science Words" to page 4
- Glue 8 copies of the table of contents to pages 5-12
- Glue an envelope to the inside of the back cover to hold scraps
- All papers need to be cut out on their outlines to fit on the pages
Well apparently that assignment was not as simple as I thought it should be for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
Problems that I saw:
- Pages mis-numbered in pen!
- Pages glued onto the wrong page numbers
- Pages missing completely ( "You never gave that to me")
- Pages glued together because of the massive amounts of glue that were used
- My Favorite: Pages glued in without being cut out so they are sticking out all over the place
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Help me! Some of the things I saw could only be fixed by starting over with a completely new notebook!
Advise me please,
Mrs. Ocean
