Interactive Notebook (Pt. 1)

Over the summer I saw lots of buzz about interactive notebooks. So I started looking for stuff on Pinterest and I started following blogs that had activities/posts about interactive notebooks. So I decided to try it out this year! 

For those of you that don't know, I teach 6th grade math. The only thing I required my students to purchase is a 5-subj spiral notebook. I already had my supply list made when I decided to do interactive notebooks, so instead of using a composition notebook, like most do when they do interactive notebooks, I just made my 5-subj. spiral work. The first two sections of the spiral are dedicated for the interactive notebook portion. The 3rd section is for Classwork. The 4th section is for Quizzes and Tests and the 5th section is for their Bellringers. So, here are my first few entries of the Interactive Notebook portion. 

Here is my 5-subj spiral. 

The first page (A) is their Math About Me page. I wanted it to be personal, so I started with this. Plus it was math related!

The second page (B) is my expectations. Each student has signed and dated theirs, so they know what I expect daily. 

The third page (C) is their expectations and guidelines for the notebook. Again, they have signed these and they know what I expect. 

Page D, E, and F are their Table of Contents. 

I also have a rubric to go along with our notebooks that I had them glue in the back of their spirals since I will be grading them every 9 weeks. 

One of their first entries is actually something that really isn't in our curriculum map, but we always have to go back and review adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, so we made a foldable to help us remember key works. 

This is what we first made. 

The inside contained an example, plus sum, difference, product and quotient. 

The following week I did an activity where we had to sort key words that will help them when they are working on word problems to decide if it's an addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problem. 

Here are the key words we added:

The other thing we cover that is not necessarily in our curriculum map is place value. The students always need a little refresher on this. 

I had them glue a place value chart in their spiral and they had an assignment. The next day we made a foldable. 

On the outside we wrote numbers and highlighted one digit. 

The inside contained two things: on the left they had to write what place-value the highlighted digit is in and on the right they had to write the decimal in word form. 

We have made it a bit further than this, but I will kind of group things by topic. Our foldable led right into decimals which we cover first in our curriculum. I will blog about that when we finish our decimal unit. 

Happy Teaching!!

*if you are interested in any of the expectations, math notebook guidelines or rubric, just email me and I would be happy to share. Jilliancmorris@gmail.com