Support #9: Note Taking Labels

In this post I mentioned that I would share different strategies for note taking for middle school students. The Math Help Binder is a great way to initially teach students to access references but the norm for middle and high school students is that they take notes and use them as a resource. I think it's really important that students in fifth grade and above start having a role to play in note taking. Below is one strategy I've used to support note taking in the inclusive classroom.

Warning: It takes a bit of your own pocket money!

Foldables are a pretty popular thing in the education blogosphere and I'm totally on board. I love interactive note taking. I'm down with Dinah Zike's foldable books and resources. I'm all about Runde's Room, To The Square Inch's store on TPT and the foldable options on pinterest. It's all good.

Generally speaking, foldables are naturally differentiated. They are both kinesthetic and visual and provide an easy and organized way for students to refer to their notes. But what happens when the writing is too much or a student struggles with putting information from the board onto paper? One of my favorite solutions is writing the notes on Avery labels. The student uses these labels to place the information on the correct line or in the correct box. This way, they are still expected to follow along with note taking and class instruction but the focus is on the content and not writing. This is also a great opportunity to modify the notes based on student strengths (visuals for visual learners), interests (check out the Pixar labels below), and reading level. See below for some examples!

I created this using Avery Templates. Here are the answers to all of the bingo definitions. I even included pictures! Students with the Avery labels had to find the definition on their page of labels and then stick it on the correct spot on the bingo sheet. 

This Bingo Sheet is from a class-wide note taking activity in fifth grade Social Studies. Students followed along with a PowerPoint and were asked to fill in the definitions as they came up in the PowerPoint. Students that wrote down the definitions of four words in a row or column received BINGO and won a prize!



Here's another example of bingo labels that I had for a Geography activity. This example did not include visuals.

Here is an interactive notebook with foldables (from this seller on TPT). Below are the labels I used for one student. He followed along with his classmates and stuck the labels to the foldable during the lesson. He was a fan of Pixar so I tried to include this interest in many of the labels.



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