Interactive Student Notebooks and Foldable #1

I've been reading A LOT about Interactive Student Notebooks. I spent all summer researching, planning and thinking about how to best implement an ISN in my classroom. Up until a week before school I was convinced of what a GREAT idea they are, but I know myself. I am not organized. My desk and teacher tables are a mess. I misplace pens and papers and notebooks constantly. My students love to laugh at me looking for things that are right in front of my face. It's a vice that I'm working on, but it's not fixed yet :) I couldn't see how I would ever be able to effectively maintain the amount of organization required.

After discussing it with a colleague and reading Sarah Rubin's amazing how-to guide (here), I decided to commit. I KNOW this will be good for both me and my students!

Following Sarah's guide, I spent the whole first week of school doing the following:

1. Decorating the cover of the composition book
2. Setting up the Table of Contents
3. Going over class rules and procedures (in the ISN).
4. Completing a learning style survey
5. Take a multiple intelligences inventory

(all of this was borrowed from here)

In keeping with the the Interactive part of the ISN, I want to use more foldables this year. I am starting the year teaching Box-and-Whisker Plots and created a foldable in Powerpoint for students to take notes. This foldable covers the 10-step method of creating a plot (an idea I got from a colleague at the school where I worked last year).

TO C M LULU DI (To See my LuLu die)

(Yes I know this is kinda weird and morbid. But, I promise, the kids remember it!)

T - Title
O - put data set in order, least to greatest
C - create a number line
M - median
L - lower extreme
U - upper extreme
L - Lower quartile
U - Upper quartile
D - draw box-whiskers

I like to create foldables in Powerpoint, because I find it easier to align things and move things to exactly where I need them. It seems like I am always fighting with Word on the formatting. I copied these 2 pages front and back, then had the students fold on the solid lines and cut on the dashed lines. This created a 10 tab (one for each step) foldable.


BAWP Foldable

Here is a picture of the final product:

I like to teach box-and-whisker plots at the beginning of the year so that I can do lots of examples using class data (like class test grades) to reinforce. I have found that this topic is really difficult for many of my below grade-level students and the constanst reinforcement all year really helps!