Note Taking Skills for 21st Century Students. Note taking skills aren’t just automatic. We tell students “take notes” but they have no idea what that means. What makes “good notes.” What do they write down? How should notes look? Ever since I went through the Writing Across the Curriculum Course at my school I realized the tremendous gap between “writing” as we’ve taught it traditionally and 21st century writing skills.
That frustration threw me into research about how to teach writing in my classroom (all of that research was then put into my new book Reinventing Writing — just because I couldn’t find the book I needed when I was struggling with teaching writing in the digital age.) Now I have a new frustration that has me grappling with noteaking. So, now, I’m taking the approach of helping students master analog notetaking. A note about In-Flip: The kids love it. I want to know what they are getting out of the videos and if they are pulling out the essential questions I’m giving them.
Cornell Notetaking System Visual Notetaking. Great Picture Books to Use for Contrast & Contradictions. One of of the main texts we use to guide our reading instruction is the amazing Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. This book provides us with the foundation for having deeper reading conversations and a common language as we develop our thoughts.
While the book has excellent text ideas to use as mentor texts, I thought it would be nice for my students to use picture books on the very first day of a new strategy before we delve into the longer text excerpts. I have therefore looked for picture books I could use with the different strategies and will publish posts as I have them for the 6 different strategies since I cannot be the only one looking for ideas. First up, “Contrast & Contradictions.” Here are a few picture books I have used or will use with the kids. Tuesday by David Wiesner started us off in our discussions about contrasts and contradictions. Another contrast and contradiction text between self and society in Mr. Like this:
Great Picture Books to Use for Aha Moments. One of of the main texts we use to guide our reading instruction is the amazing Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. This book provides us with the foundation for having deeper reading conversations and a common language as we develop our thoughts. While the book has excellent text ideas to use as mentor texts, I thought it would be nice for my students to use picture books on the very first day of a new strategy before we delve into the longer text excerpts. I have therefore looked for picture books I could use with the different strategies and will publish posts as I have them for the 6 different strategies since I cannot be the only one looking for ideas. The first post was on Contrast & Contradictions, so this week I am turning to Aha Moments.
While Oscar’s Spots by Janet Robertson is more than 20 years old, I still love the copy we have in our classroom. While there is no specific aha moment in What Do You Do With An Idea? Like this: