![]() If it takes me a week to grade something and hand it back, it won’t be next to the other stuff we did on a particular topic that day. But with notebooks, once it’s in, it’s in. It’s easier to keep related work and activities together because you can move stuff around. With binders there’s nothing permanent about putting work in. Binders also give me a little more flexibility than with notebooks. I’m not stuck at school and I can actually eat dinner at a decent hour. I can actually take several period’s worth of these “binders” home to grade. Students can staple a unit’s worth of work together for a binder check. I also don’t need to provide as many class supplies like glue, scissors, and tape.īinders seem a little easier to grade than the notebooks. When I used binders, I definitely saved class time by eliminating the gluing. We can do a worksheet, or write on lined paper, and just put it inside. I appreciate the organization and simplicity of using a binder. Students only need to open and close their binders in order to organize their work. ![]() I provide a list of vocabulary words, and students draw images and color the entire page! Upsides of Using Bindersīy far the biggest upside of using binders is no glue! Glue, tape, doesn’t matter, it’s a hassle and it takes extra time. I like that half sheets are easy to secure in a notebook (they are easy to grade, too!) One of my favorite creative assignments in a notebook is a Dividing Page. But that was always too prescriptive for me and I prefer to have more flexibility and just put stuff on the next available page. You can check out interactive notebook ideas online, where there are left and right page activities that you do on the notebook paper. In all my years of teaching I use worksheets on a weekly basis, and I feel wasteful when we glue them in. I think notebooks work great when you want students to do a lot of their own writing and creating inside. The students take too long, and glue is super tempting to play with (yes, even for high school students).Īnother downside is that I feel bad when we complete a worksheet and glue it on a blank notebook page. Gluing is just annoying to do on a daily basis. I wish you could hear the tone of exasperation in my voice. Grading notebooks requires flipping through pages and hunting for assignments that aren’t on the page I expect them to be. Even if I have students leave their notebooks open to a certain page so I can check, I have to stay late at school, which I do enough of as it is. I can’t take more than a handful home because a class set of notebooks is super heavy and cumbersome. The biggest downside of using notebooks is that grading them is logistically challenging. If you want to see how I decorate notebook covers with students, check out my blog post Beginning of the Year Activity: Decorating Science Notebook Covers. ![]() It’s fun, I get to know more about my students’ interests, and they get to be creative and express themselves. One of my favorite beginning of the year activities is to decorate science notebook covers. Alternatively, I can clear out a few cabinets in my classroom and students can store them in class. Notebooks are lightweight and are easy for students to take back and forth to class. Students can write, draw, and take notes in their notebooks, and all they need is a pencil! I love the creativity and personal ownership that students feel when using notebooks. Everything is in one place, and with an updated Table of Contents, it is so easy to go back and look at previous work (unless it falls out!). At the end of the year we can look back on everything we did and remember all of our neat learning experiences. Something I love about using notebooks is that we start with a bunch of blank pages, and during the year it transforms into a unique portfolio of student work. In this blog post, I’ll share my experiences using both organization systems and write about some of the benefits and shortcomings of each. So if notebooks are so great, then why did I ever switch to using binders? Well, there were some things about using notebooks that were getting to me over the years. While I see benefits to both notebooks and binders, there’s something about having that complete notebook at the end of the year. In my classroom, I’ve used spiral notebooks for 5 years and binders for 2. My first year student teaching my master teacher used notebooks for the first half of the year, and then binders for the second half of the year. ![]() Notebooks, binders, Google Drive, every teacher and every class needs an organization system for note taking and keeping track of work. A Unit Organizer is similar to a Table of Contents for a Science Binder.
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