Try It! Interactive Notebooks for World Languages
Interactive Notebooks were a disaster my first year. It was mostly because I jumped in feet first and just made it up as I went.
And that’s okay.
As Thomas Sauer is fond of saying, no one ever died of bad language instruction.
But with more anticipation, planning, and having a reason for each choice that goes into each entry, my approach has come a long way in three semesters. Do I still make some stuff up as I go? Oh yeah. But I don’t randomly decide “Hey, maybe this should go in the notebook!” anymore…hardly.
But after three semesters honing and refining what goes into my students’ interactive notebooks, this is what I can tell you.
What is an interactive notebook anyway?
I don’t use textbooks anymore. It’s more work for me trying to figure out how to make them work,
and the kids can’t take them with them when the class is over anyway. If they’re going to have a reference, I want it to be A) something they can actually use and B) something they can keep using when they’re out of my class.
Is it a place for practice with the language? Yes. That’s another way that maintaining an interactive notebook is superior to a textbook–the students build their reference, so they are actively processing the information instead of passively “absorbing.” However, if it’s not something that will make a handy resource in completing other activities later–in my class or beyond–it generally doesn’t go in. (That’s what Classroom and Seesaw are for, right?)
What DO you put in them?
A few categories I would recommend for anyone, though, would be Vocabulary and Texts. How do you plan what goes in?
- If students only remember 5 things on the page, what should they be?
- How can you draw attention to those 5 things visually?
- How can students manipulate that information in a meaningful way?
- What information should be provided for context or to save time?
- Simply fill in the blanks–leave the most important words out of a sentence or set of words and have them copy it in their own handwriting.
- Color coding–with just one or two highlighter colors, students can create their own categories or emphasize what they know and what they need to look up in a text.
- Scramble for sorting–have students arrange words or phrases or even sentences into categories to help them form semantic connections.
- Vocabulary flaps–if students have to cue their recall with a visual and THEN they get to check the word, they have a better resource than a glossary style list. These work for questions and answers too: context instead of translation!
- Accordion folds–these allow more information to fit on the page, but they also allow for increasing complexity, say, moving from a visual to a word to a phrase to a sentence.
- Sliders–I like these for things like verb endings so students can see how the roots interact with suffixes, but they’re also good for randomizing questions with different vocabulary.
So if you want to try interactive notebooks, remember…
- Start with the essentials–what are the most basic things you want student to remember?
- Plan categories for the kind of information you want–for your own organization.
- Use Pinterest to inspire you, but use only what your students will need.
- Incorporate context and memory cues that do not involve translation.
- Make information easy to find and easy to use.
- Focus students’ attention to what’s most important with visuals.
- Provide ways for students to verify the accuracy of their work.
- Design ways for students to interact with and use new information
- Build in opportunities to refer back to and apply learning from each page.
- Jump in and try! No one ever died from bad language instruction!
