Science Notebooks
1.Notebooks are Thinking Tools
2. Notebooks Guide Teacher Instruction
3. Notebooks Enhance Literacy Skills
4. Notebooks Support Differentiated Learning
5. Notebooks Foster Teacher Collaboration
5E Learning Cycle
Engage /- Pique students’ curiosity and generate interest
- Determine students’ current understanding
- Invite students to raise their own questions
- Encourage students to compare their ideas with those of others
- Enable teachers to assess what students do or do not understand about the stated outcomes of the lesson
Explore /
- Students interact with materials and ideas through classroom and small-group discussions
- Students consider different ways to solve a problem or frame a question
- Students acquire a common set of experiences so that they can compare results and ideas with their classmates
- Students observe, describe, record, compare, and share their ideas and experiences
- Students express their developing understanding of the content
Explain /
- Students explain concepts and ideas
- Students listen to and compare the explanations of others with their own
- Students become involved in student-to-student discourse in which they explain their thinking to others and debate their ideas
- Students revise their ideas
- Students record their ideas and current understanding
- Students use labels, terminology, and formal language
- Students compare their thinking with what they previously thought
Elaborate /
- Students make conceptual connections between new and former experiences
- Students connect ideas, solve problems, and apply their understanding to a new situation
- Students use scientific terms and descriptions
- Students draw reasonable conclusions from evidence and data
- Students deepen their understanding of concepts and processes
- Students communicate their understanding to others
Evaluate /
- Students demonstrate what they understand
- Students share their current thinking with others
- Students assess their own progress by comparing their current understanding with their prior knowledge
- Students ask questions that take them deeper into a concept
Notebook Prompts for the Engage phase:
- My beginning understandings:
- One thing I already know about ______is…
- What do your senses tell you about ______?
- What do you observe happening when ______?
- One thing I wonder about ….
- I am amazed by…
- I am puzzled by…
- This is similar to…
- One question I have is…
Notebook Prompts for the Explore phase:
- I observed…
- I noticed…
- I used my senses to find out that…
- This is similar to…
- I thought it was interesting that…
- These results make me think…
Diagram
Height
Observations
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Notebook Prompts for the Explain phase:
- I thought it was interesting that…
- Three main ideas I learned today…
- I still wonder…
- At first I thought ______, but now I think ______
- One thing I will remember about today’s lesson is…
- The most important thing to remember is…
- One thing I’m still not sure about is…
- I changed my mind about ______because ______
- Something I haven’t understood before that I understand now is…
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