Reading Journal Interactive Notebook

Have you fallen in love with Interactive Notetaking? We have! I love the hands-on nature of the activities that involve so much more of the brain than a plain worksheet or simply copying down notes.

We have fallen in love with Interactive Notebooks over the last few years. When my 3rd daughter started school, I couldn’t get her to do anything that even resembled a worksheet, so we had to get creative.

That is actually why I started Life Over C’s.

We needed learning activities that were more hands-on than what a worksheet could offer, because worksheets were causing her to get angry and frustrated. (We later discovered that she has severe ADHD and anxiety and seeing all the information on one piece of paper was just too much.)

So, we added games, hands-on activities and interactive notetaking to our homeschool routine.

Now that most of my kids are older, they have a lot more to say in their educational choices. They get to choose the books that they read throughout the year, which makes it a lot more motivating for them.

However, they are required to show proof that they have actually done the reading and while conversations are great for this, it can be hard for a child to recall in May what they read in September.

I love using activities like this interactive notebook to keep track of their reading assignments and it’s great for diving into their thoughts on each book. This isn’t all that we do for reading by any stretch of the imagination, but this is perfect for their independent reading choices and can be applied for other middle school students.

Starting with the covers. The covers are all made with a durable plastic and will last the entire school year. Even the spiral bound ones. No more worrying about covers falling off the notebook because the kids have been using them so much.

And the kids can label their notebook with the ID label, so you can easily see which notebook belongs to which kid. Super important since kids are not usually the most organized people in the world.

And you know those days when you get started on an interactive notebook activity and the kids are having all sorts of fun cutting their pieces apart and then…

Time runs out.

Or there is a fire drill because another one of the kids got a little out-of-hand with their science experiment.

Or some other unplanned thing happens that means you don’t have time to complete the activity. And you’re stuck trying to sort out all the little pieces and figure out how to store them until the next day.

The Five Star® Interactive Notetaking items have pockets designed just for those occasions. So, you can come inside after your fire drill and have the kids store the pieces inside the pockets for safekeeping.

No one loses their mind because pieces are missing the next day.

A definite win.

And one of the most important pieces of any interactive notebook is the table of contents.

Five Star® Interactive Notetaking Items come with card stock pages for the table of contents and every page has a space to write the page number, so things can stay organized.

And helps the kids find their activities later on.

My kids can use the table of contents to track the titles of the books that they have read, and which pages their summaries are on.

Kids can quickly label the page numbers in their notebook and track each activity in the table of contents, so you know exactly where they are.