Foldables, Labsheets, and other miscellaneous journal entries
First of all, I really had to think about why scientists keep journals. A scientist keeps journals to collect data and observations of the science that he or she is learning. Whatever the scientist finds necessary to record, will help them later when they write their paper or make their discovery. I wanted my journals to be more like that, so, I decided that unless it was kid created, it wasn't going into the journal. They needed to find it useful to them. That doesn't mean that we didn't paste things in there, we did, we just decided as a group if it would be a good idea to keep it before we pasted it in there. Most of the time the kids wanted to keep the song lyrics, the pictures and the popup books. Those type of things just weren't mandatory to be in there for some type of grade
Foldables: Second, I changed the way I was doing foldables. I think I liked making and designing foldables more than the kids liked copying my masterpiece. I highly recommend you buy Dinah Zike's book on Science foldables. In this book she describes foldables as folded graphic organizers that can help a student learn a concept. The STUDENT learn, not the teacher. Her ideas are amazing because she talks about how concepts can be broken down into chunks or ideas. Those ideas can be made into folded pieces and written about. Example: Complete Metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupa, adult... that is four pieces. Living and non-living, two pieces, etc. She has different fold designs. The student chooses a fold or makes up their own and then draws, colors and creates his or her own notes about that topic. The way she describes it, it is a creative endeavor that lets kids design their own 3-D note taking. I had to let go of the idea that my notes and my foldable was something to copy. That was hard, but I did it.
Lab sheets: They look cool in the AIMS book or other science resource you have made copies from but they don't look cool empty with half explained answers and unfinished graphs. I know that kids can make messy graphs and charts and it may take forever for them to start doing their own data collection, but you have to let them do this. YOU HAVE TO, its part of their Process TEKS. With practice they get faster at it and they get better at designing it. Just because you can read a graph doesn't mean you can make one and the only way they will learn to make one is if you assign that in their journal! After they are done collecting their data and organizing it, they need to learn to write a conclusion about what they learned.
Why I like journaling!
Say you have over 100 kids a day in and out of your classroom like I did when I was in a departmentalized 5th grade teaching Science. If you are using multiple choice assessments to both practice for the big test and to help you decide if your students are getting the curriculum, I can tell you right now, other than finding out that your kids don't get a concept, you will be amiss as to why that is if you just rely on short 5 to 10 mc question common assessments. You can infer all you want if you are looking at distractors to guess what it is that your students don't get, but aside from taking each kid aside and asking them personally (impossible to do if you have 120 kids) you really don't know unless you give them a chance to explain themselves and their ideas. The best way to do that is by getting them to write. Writing is a process that has been pushed aside for several reasons in the Science classroom. Let me give you a list of reasons (some that I felt, some that I heard others say) about writing in Science Class:
- Writing takes too long to do when I have so many standards to review and cover
- It takes too long to grade writing assessments.
- They write so poorly that its a waste of time.
- My ELLs and parent denials can't write well and its not my job to teach them English
- My Sped kids can't write, they can't even get started, they just stare at the paper.
- I don't have time to grade conventions like spelling and grammar.
But, I think most of the problem that I had was feeling like writing added more to what I was already doing in Science and seemed like one more thing I had to do and grade. The others on the list were just excuses as to why I couldn't do writing because really I hadn't even tried writing too often because I was trying to get down classroom prep and hands-on. You can't be a slacker in a Science lab, you have to be ready. The kids loved my class, they loved the hands-on but in the end they didn't remember much because we didn't process what we learned, we rushed through the curriculum so fast that we really didn't think about it. It was so frustrating because I was working so hard at making sure I was "covering" everything, but on the other hand I was getting nowhere, so I decided to try writing. When I first tried journaling (and not pasting foldables, labsheets and other stuff) in the ISN I wanted the students to be journaling often on everything we were learning about. I was discouraged to find out from a mentor that I really should write a specific rubric for every assignment I wanted them to write about. I felt that it was too much to do that, so a 4th grade teacher, Chris Larson, and I came up with a rubric for Science Writing that could be applied to just about any writing assignment given in an ISN without having to customize, as long as the teacher understood the standard and had a criteria for learning that standard. I use this rubric to this day, although now for performance projects and summatives I will write a specific rubric for the assignment. Here is what my ISN rubric looks like:
You will notice that this rubric contains both criteria for pictures and composition. We did that on purpose so that our Sped kids and ELL's would have a break in the writing process. We figured the most important thing about these assignments was explaining the concept that they just learned. Did it really matter if they couldn't spell, write grammatically, etc? Quite honestly, no. I just wanted to know if they got the concept that we just learned about. When you get kids that can be anywhere from beginners to advanced high on TELPAS, that is reality and it is going to take some time to teach those kids language skills. In the meantime, if you make them feel safe by allowing them to draw and label pictures when they are having a hard time explaining, well, let me just say that my kids started performing at a higher level and I started understanding more about the student but mostly about my teaching.
You see, many of my ELL students were under the radar with me. They were really well behaved, had spotless beautifully colored notebooks with perfect foldables that they had copied from my samples in class. They filled in their lab sheets beautifully according to their group partners work and copied vocabulary definitions very nicely. 100 on the notebook, 60 on the Science test at the end of the year! Once I started having the students write about what they learned a very different scenario took place. I started noticing that words that they heard in class were mispelled because they misheard what I had said. I noticed that sometimes I was going too fast and I was leaving some of my kids behind. Once we started processing the learning, the feedback I got from my students led me to understandings about how well I taught a lesson and about what I needed to do to fix their misconceptions. Let me give you an example. At the beginning of the year I had the students take home their journals and they had to draw and explain 3 examples of solids, liquids and gases in their kitchen at home. They had to explain why they thought they were solids, liquids and gases (has a definite shape, can take the shape of the container, etc) One student drew a picture of a candle flame and pointed to the flame with a label of the word gas. When I asked the student why that was, she said that they had a gas stove and it had a flame, so a candle flame must be made of gas too, right? I wouldn't have gotten that information from a multiple choice test. I also saw growth in writing from my Sped and ELL populations from the beginning of the year to the end. This is great for TELPAS and helps move our ELLs forward.
Grading with my ISN rubric
Originally I thought that grading with a rubric was going to take forever, but since I was desperate to assess why my students were failing, I gave it a shot only to find out that grading with a rubric was actually easier than marking mc tests. No work or little effort-1, that is really easy! It was also really entertaining. I got a great kick out of looking at pictures and diagrams, reading their thoughts and getting to know my students. I made sure to write comments on each assignment, and I noticed that my students couldn't wait to read my feed back. We got closer as a class and my students felt safer with me when they understood that I cared about what they were doing.
This rubric that we created is a 5 point rubric and we did that for a good reason. I noticed that when you assign regular responses in a journal students may fall behind in their work and have a hard time catching up. Zero's and low grades can pile up quite easily and after awhile Sped students and low performers will find it hard to catch up. In this 5 point system a 1 is worth a 50 in the grade book, 2 a 60 and so on. This way if a journal gets away from the kid it's easier for them to recover. But we also did something else to help them recover work in a journal, and this strategy, quite by accident, changed the way my students felt about ISN's and the way I felt about them as well! It all has to do with not wanting to tote those notebooks back and forth.
The last straw: toting the ISN crates back and forth in the minivan!
Have you ever gotten so tired after teaching all day that you just take your grading home for a ride only to bring it back to school the next day, ungraded? Well try that with science notebooks and you will come to the realization that the madness has to stop! As much as I actually loved grading now that I was using a rubric, sometimes it was just too tiresome to tote stuff back and forth. So I asked my friends for ideas on how to grade their notebooks and this is where my good friend Monika Thomas helped me see the light about feedback. Monika had been to a fantastic ISN training and in that training they taught the participants how to do spot checks for assignments in class. I used this idea to do two things, one, set the standard of work that I wanted to see from the notebook, and two, let the kids know that I wasnt going to let assignments and grading get away from me or the kids for that matter. So here is what you do:
The Spot check: Is it "Ink Worthy?"
- Assign a journaling assignment to your students. It can be a response to what they learned in the lab, an example of science happening at home, an experience they might have had or seen happening in the news.
- Let them know which vocabulary words are necessary for this assignment. I like it best when they build the list with me, "Which vocabulary words from the word wall do you think we will need to use for this homework assignment?" They write this list on the corner of their journal page so that they don't forget to use them. Extra points if they add more words. Have them underline the words in their entry.
- What kind of pictures or diagrams do we need to draw, if any? Remind them to label their drawings or diagrams
- Next day, first thing in class have them get out their journals. Here is the kicker, if they forgot their journal I have them come in during lunch to complete that assignment and we will paste it in the journal when they bring it. If they have their journal but they didnt do the assignment, take a pencil and write a "1" on the top of the blank sheet that the entry was suppose to be on.
- Have the kids share their entries with their groups as you go around the classroom spot checking entries looking for the following: colored pictures, labels, vocabulary, detailed explanation, above and beyond. That's five things, however many they have, that is the number you give them. (its quick) Anyone who gets a 5 they get an ink stamp or sticker. When you are done with the spot check choose various notebook entries and exemplify what you are looking for. Show the class what a good entry looks like. I like to choose good things from kids that didn't quite make it because I want to positively reinforce what they did right.
- Explain that you wrote those grades in pencil! Give them a small post it note or post it tag if they got a grade of 3 or below. Tell them that if they fix what is missing from the criteria that you will re-grade it if they put a star on the post it to let you know they fixed their work. Only a 5 will make it to INK WORTHY.
- Repeat this method for a week or so. Don't forget to go back and grade their work for real, provide feedback in writing and regrade the fixes.
GT and ISNs
A lot of your GT students will really get into having a Science notebook especially if you treat it like they are really collecting data and acting like a scientist, but for those kids who aren't really interested in becoming the next Sheldon, Leonard, Raj or Howard, I made a modification to my grading that showed what my GT knew, because many times they easily knew the content without needing a notebook to store the information. Remember when I talked about notebooks getting away from kids? This is usually the kid that did that. This kid is a procrastinator, or they have ideas of grandeur that start off great but end in a fizzle because they lost interest. My job is to make sure all kids know the content, and I didn't want to punish a kid that did know it, so I made the summative tests weigh heavier than notebook grades so that students who were GT but not as industrious as others could have grades that reflected their knowledge as well as their work ethic. They might not get an A because they didn't have the work ethic, but they could get a B or C without a problem. With those guys it was hit or miss for a 5 depending on their interest of the topic or whether they felt the topic worthy of drawing a detailed picture.
Group Grading: After getting to know the rubric, I could have the students provide feedback to each others assignments that I could verify afterwards. This was a great activity to do as a bell ringer. It helped them to learn how to critique and provide feedback to each other in a way that was helpful. In this case I told them that if they helped their partners to get a 5, their team would get points.
Other Stuff: If you let your students design their own foldables, create their own graphs and write their own conclusions, these assignments also lend themselves very well to a 5 point rubric similar to the one described above. Criteria might include: Title and labels, organization, easy to read, and detailed conclusion using appropriate vocabulary.
The lightest notebook of all...
The lightest notebook of all would be the VIRTUAL NOTEBOOK! If your students are connected to technology, many of these ideas could be easily applied to technology. This opens up a plethora of opportunities, for example, kids can film or take pictures of science, create their own podcasts, how-to videos etc. You can use web 2.0 tools like Evernote, Live Binder, Google Docs, or other online applications to do online journaling. Your kids can even create their own blog on Edublog. The only thing that I would have them do by hand until they understand what they are doing is graphing and that is because they need to have a strong understanding of scale and x/y axis before they have a computer program do it for them. They can always take a picture of their graph or any data collection that they organize and create. Best of all you are only lugging home your laptop and not notebooks.
If you try these suggestions your notebook may not be as thick as it use to be, but the work inside it will be genuine, your students will be proud of it and your students will feel like real scientists. There is so much more that I have to say about journaling and how to use ISN's but I'm not writing a book, I'm writing a blog. (I'm sure these two entries just feel like you were reading a book...)
I hope your students do ink worthy work for you this year! If you click on this link I will give you my PDF file of the rubric I use for ISN writing. Good luck with Science journals in your classroom! It was one of the most rewarding endeavors I have had with my classes and I truly believe they are worth it.