Why we create Interactive Science Notebooks

Here is a short article written for the NSTA a number of years ago on the rationale behind the use of Interactive Science Notebooks. As fourth and fifth graders we aspire to the quality of thought and work this teacher's eighth grade students produce, but we are on our way.


Using Interactive Notebooks for Inquiry-Based Science

The interactive science notebook (ISN) is a perfect opportunity for science educators to encapsulate and promote the most cutting-edge constructivist teaching strategies while simultaneously addressing standards, differentiation of instruction, literacy development, and maintenance of an organized notebook as laboratory and field scientists do. Students then have a packaged notebook representing all of their learning throughout the year...[it is an extremely effective] innovation in enhancing general learning through the encouragement of writing across the curriculum, personalization, and metacognition strategies, while simultaneously serving to promote more specific inquiry-based science instruction by which students focus, experiment, reflect, and apply based on their personal connections to learning.

Click here for the complete article.