When reading this article I was taken back to my summer in block A where we discussed and investigated how students can greatly learn from keeping a writers notebook. I believe the same is true for science notebooks. When keeping a writers notebook the students learned the concepts by doing and trying them out, not from being lectured on them. I believe science needs to be learned in the same way. The science notebook are an important way to give the students a space to get their ideas/questions/observations down, where they can go back and review when doing inquiry to see if they answered the questions they were after. It also gets them to think deeper of how to answer these questions. Meta-cognition is a huge aspect for students to understand so they can deepen their thinking and reasoning skills. Having notebooks would allow the students to constantly review to be able to think about their thinking. I would have science notebooks in my science classroom for all the benefits listed in this article and some others. I think having notebooks allows students to use multiple means of representation to be able to get their thoughts out. Students could draw pictures, sketch graphs, and write sentences as ways to express their ideas and observations. As the article stated I agree that this is extremely important of ELL students. Studies show that it is important for students to learn in their first language before they can learn and transfer what they know to a new language. By using the notebooks they can draw their observations and write in their native language to begin with as they are learning English and all the rules.
No comments:
Post a Comment