Interactive Notebooks- How Do We Reflect?

Welcome back to my interactive notebook series. Today I thought I would share the how. How do I begin? More importantly, how do I lay down expectations and assess those expectations throughout the school year.

Well first off, I hook my students into the idea that they are authors and they will be making a non-fiction book of their first grade school year. We learn about non-fiction text features and we search for them with our detective hat and a little pink panther music in the background.

Once we are all excited about making our own book, we brainstorm and learn what makes a thumbs up notebook. I introduce all of the components and then I spend a day on each one and we practice them.

As I said, I break each of these categories into a separate lesson. For the cutting out the pieces, I model thumbs up, thumbs so-so and thumbs down cutting. We talk about what those pages look like. Then I give them each a sticky note with a thumb on it and they get to vote on which one they believe is thumbs up cutting. We do this for each category, they love it!

Model different types of gluing and have your students decide what they feel is thumbs up gluing.

Model different types of coloring and have your students decide what they feel is thumbs up coloring.

Now that we are all on the same page, we begin working on pages in our notebooks. In the beginning we fill out a self-reflection sheet to assess our page that we complete. As my students become more aware of the expectations, we just do the reflection page once in a while.

We glue this page on the left side of their notebook (I have my kids do their notebook pages onto the right hand side of there their notebook). It makes a good reminder of what is expected.

So….would you an interactive notebook reflection page? Grab your free thumbs up self-reflection page here.

Remember if you missed my previous posts on interactive notebooks, click below.