Five Good Reasons to Use Science Notebooks

Five Good Reasons to Use Science Notebooks

For this I just made comments on each of their bullet points.

1. I agree with their argument about science notebooks that it encourages students to “use writing for thinking and empowers them to be interactive in their own language.” I can see the notebooks as a good tool because students can write down exactly what they are thinking when they are thinking it. If they wait to speak up until you’ve asked them they may have forgotten how they felt and what they thought at the moment.

2. Including what I said in part one it is also true that this benefits not only students but teachers as well. If the notebooks are collected by the teacher the teacher can see if there is a common question and branch off from there. Making use of a “teachable moment.”

3. Notebooks do have a benefit for students’ literacy, I agree. I believe that writing is a fantastic tool to use in any subject. By getting students thoughts on the page right away it is easier for them to communicate it later. They will have more detail and emotion in their sharing and there is nothing bad about that.

4. Maybe one of the best parts is that if I’m teaching a science class that utilizes notebooks then I know that those notebooks do not discriminate or not allow anyone to use them. It is simply the individual students thoughts being written down and if it is in another language or illegible as long as there is a way after for me, as the teacher, to find out what it is they were thinking then there is a great benefit to that for both sides.

5. I liked that all of the teachers of the school got into the effort. They all realized that notebooks were a simple and effective way to understand what the students were thinking and it allowed the teachers to collaborate about their findings. Personally I would like to be a part of something like that. that made me feel valued and made me understand my students better.