Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners

I was interested in reading Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners: How to Scaffold Content for Academic Success by Marcia Carter, Anita Hernandez, and Jeannine Richison for ideas for helping all students access content and develop academic language in social studies next year. I had heard of interactive notebooks, but I either never heard a detailed explanation or I heard it too long ago and did not implement it in order to retain the information, so I was excited to see a resource focusing on this tool.

The book had more of a formal feel with a lot of theory, rather than the conversational style that I prefer, but I still gained a lot of valuable information. (I guess I should clarify that it is still user-friendly and a comfortable read.) A lot of the theory was not new to me, but it was an important piece since their target audience was for mainstream content teachers who may not have an ESL background. Nonetheless, I am glad that I bought the book and it is a worthwhile resource. Even if you do already have a strong ESL background, it would be helpful if you are unfamiliar with interactive notebooks but would like to see how they can help your students and the ins and outs of implementing them in your class.

My main area of consideration right now is how many notebooks are too many. I want to incorporate reader's and writer's notebooks into my language arts time block, and would love to utilize interactive notebooks for social studies. Yet, I worry that three separate notebooks might be a little too much. Thus, I am thinking about how I can reap the benefits of all three in a user-friendly format for my students. A 4/5 teacher at my school creates a booklet/journal for his students for each unit. I have been thinking of doing this next year for my social studies units, so my initial thought is that I may do this with an interactive journal format. It would be a booklet, rather than a spiral notebook, but it would contain all the important pieces of an interactive notebook. All of the other teachers at my school received GLAD training before I started, and I think that interactive journals was a piece of that which may have inspired my colleague's booklets.

I also want to have a class blog next year, and I am trying to decide which pieces of the teacher support/scaffolding can be best facilitated on the blog for students and parents to refer to later.

This is one more resource that will impact my instruction for next year, and I am glad that I had a chance to read it.