Teaching Science With Interactive Notebooks
- Kellie Marcarelli - San Diego City and County Schools
Foreword by Rodger W. Bybee
Kellie Marcarelli covers everything from rationale, procedures, organization, optimal use to propel student processing, thinking, learning, and metacognition, to how to explain the process to students and model it for them, to related classroom management, time management, assessment, and homework. A special segment on "accountable talk" also shows teachers how to develop the patterns of scientific discussion through classroom discourse that provide grounding for students' notebook entries.
This book can enrich learning in any science classroom and supports the effort to make students the owners of their own learning. Interactive notebooks are natural differentiators that allow students to learn standards-based content and demonstrate that learning in individualized ways.
Supplements
Teaching Science With Interactive Notebooks includes a number of student reproducible pages and sample notebook pages, which are in color in the original. Teachers will benefit by seeing these pages in color and by being able to print them to show to their students as examples of what notebook pages could and should look like.
Site contains:
- Reproducible examples of interactive notebook pages
- Related books for teaching science
- Journal articles about interactive notebooks and teaching science
“Teaching Science With Interactive Notebooks provides teacher-friendly, practical advice for strategies that all science teachers can use.”
"Highly recommend this book to science teachers who want to do science notebooks but fear the drudgery that sometimes is associated with them. The interactive notebooks that Marcarelli creates not only are interesting for the teacher but also fun and motivating for students."
"Marcarelli’s book provides teachers with research-based strategies that actively engage students in their own learning. With interactive notebooks, students learn how to collect and organize scientific information and how to communicate and refine their thinking. Moreover, students take ownership and pride in their work. This book is a valuable tool that every science teacher should have.
"A powerful reference that will be full of my sticky notes and used daily."
“In an era when science teachers are being asked more and more to teach writing skills and build science literacy, this book presents an engaging and creative way to answer that challenge and encourage the use of higher-order thinking skills.”
"Whether they are doing hands-on investigation, synthesizing a piece of text, or researching online, my students do the work of scientists by creating something every day in their science notebooks. The notebooks are veritable portfolios of their thinking. My students take pride in collecting daily evidence of their work and are better able to organize, focus, and reflect on their learning in the notebook spread. Because I am planning with the notebook in mind, my lessons are clearer and the structure allows us to focus on the learning at hand. I can’t imagine not using them. This is not rocket science, just good teaching!”
“Easy to read, with good examples and illustrations. The rationale is spelled out for every step, the setup for the interactive notebook is clearly explained, and you can hear the enthusiasm of the author, which makes the reader enthusiastic about trying the strategy.”
"Interactive notebooks are awesome. This book gives you step-by-step instructions on what they are, their many uses, and day to day instructions on getting them up and running smoothly in your classroom."
I love this book! I have been using it with both my middle school science students and my graduate school students. Some of the material needs tweeking, but the overall concept is fantastic!
