I discovered Interactive Notebooks!!

I swore I would NEVER become addicted to Pintrest. I thought it was a great way to organize writing prompt pictures and used it that way toward the end of last year. Somewhere throughout the summer, I started looking at it a little more...then a little more...then a LOT more! I saw "pins" by my cute niece who teaches 2nd grade about things called "Anchor Charts" and other ideas. I started "pinning" some of them and before I knew it...I had a bunch on my "School Board!" Of course, once you start something like this, it leads to you other places, ideas, and you just get overwhelmed!!

Well...I found this FABULOUS pin/idea/link/site/whatever you want to call it called an "Interactive Notebook." I searched and searched getting more and more information about them and then stumbled across a blog posted by a middle school English/Social Studies teacher somewhere back east. First of all, he (yes..he...a male teach who blogs! Who knew!!) was fun to imagine talking via the blog and then he had AWESOME pictures to give me a visual of what he did in his class. (You can learn more about him/follow him/whatever HERE...)

I pinned.

I read.

I pinned some more.

I printed out his pages.

I blew up his photos.

I commented on his blog (and he commented back!!).

And then I started trying to figure out how to do it myself. 

After going through endless trial and error (I am quite OCD about how my handouts/worksheets/examples look and had to make sure everything was "just so..." before I could teach it.) and many notebooks, I've started working on them in with my classes!

I. LOVE. THEM!!!!!

I've had GREAT response from my 8th and 9th graders so far...granted it's only been a week...but I'm optimistic! So...with this blog, I'm hoping to journal/chronicle our experiences (good and bad) with them and what I would do differently next time. 

Stay tuned...