In Part I of my post on Interactive Student Notebooks (ISN), I wrote about why the notebook is useful for personalizing history class for students and for preventing loss because of its unique cover made by the student. As most of you are well aware, a book is much more than its cover!
The inside of the ISN, by the end of the year, should be a portfolio of student work in history. It should include previewing assignments, notes in the form of graphic organizers, and in some cases assessments for each lesson. The students keep track of each unit in a table of contents on the first page of the notebook.
The table of contents is helpful so that students know where to find notes when they are referring back to a page in the notebook for a test or quiz or to help them take part in a discussion during a unit that builds upon a previous one. It can become burdensome, however, to have students number the in succession from 1 on. Instead, each unit in our ISN is a roman numeral. For example, all the pages for our current unit on Political Philosophy are labeled VI because it is the sixth unit of study.
I suppose that an example of the ISN in action would be appropriate. For the Political Philosophy unit we have 3 pages labeled with the roman numeral VI so far. The first page is a preview activity that the students have titled “My Philosophy”. On this page they will respond to four questions, one for each aspect of John Locke’s and Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy that we will study. The first question that we asked the students to respond to in their ISN was “What would the world be like with no government or laws?” The students could respond using words or by drawing a picture if they were so inclined (note the use of multiple intelligences here.) After discussing their answers, we go on to introduce the State of Nature according to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
On pages 2 and 3 of the unit the students pasted in graphic organizers to help them process the information about State of Nature that they are learning. There is a space to define State of Nature, and then two boxes on either side for Hobbes’s and Locke’s definitions. The processing activity is in the form of a continuum. After learning about each philosophy, the students decide with whom they agree and place a dot on the continuum. The bottom space of each category asks them to explain why they fall where they do on the continuum. See the example below:
After filling in all of the pieces of the graphic organizer and having thorough discussions about each the students are ready for their assessment activity. In this unit the students will be writing an essay and printing two copies: one for their notebooks and one for me.
This is the ISN in a nutshell. There are several other activities that I will list in future posts that you can use for this very versitile, very special portfolio.