Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Interactive Notebooks-Completion Problems This year I decided to have my science classes put together interactive science notebooks. They took spiral notebooks and created a table of contents in the front and then numbered each of their pages. Any notes that we took in class were glued onto the left side of their notebook. The right sides of their notebooks I asked them to basically summarize the notes from the left side. They could do this in a variety of ways, draw picture, write a story, create a concept map, etc. I don't care HOW they summarize as long as they ARE summarizing. We started out okay, but now I can't hardly get any of my students to complete their notebooks! I grade them every two weeks and it's rapidly becoming a waste of time to even collect them. I still like the concept but what can I do differently to encourage them to complete this? I take it as a homework assignment in my grade book. Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) I had a similar problem with 10th graders and a writing journal. I turned it into a competition. I gave the students a specific length of time as the "qualifying dates". They had to have the best written, organized, executed, etc... journal for that length of time. The kids really cleaned it up and tried to win! Forgive my lack of science knowledge, but maybe you could challenge the students to create the best atoms unit. The winner for each of my segments (usually two weeks) got to hold onto some ugly frog wearing a feather hat. They loved it. Kids are weird.