Interactive notebooks are study tools at their core. There are many ways to encourage students to develop this relationship with their notebook. Here are a few:
My favorite ways to promote the use of INBs as study tools:
- Make sure to keep a table of contents so that all pages are numbered and easy to identify
- When doing a review for a test, have students identify which page each problem on the review best matches with before they attempt the problem. Encourage them to even find a very similar problem to compare their structures.
- Allow students to use their notebook on quizzes (and even tests)
- When doing recap warm-ups, encourage students to look back at notes
- If a student gets stuck, work on encouraging them to learn how to refer back to notes before giving up
- Test corrections – students find what page best matches a problem they missed and finds and re-works a similar problem from their notes and then corrects the problem that they missed from the test with a bit of reflection on where they went wrong
- Include reference pages that are easy to find in the notebook. I often print the most important things on neon paper to make it even easier to find.
This post is part of the INB 101 – The Basics series.
Math by the Mountain 