Interactive notebooks are a powerful tool for organizing science teaching and learning. My students use EVERY SINGLE PAGE in their journals by the end of the year! With so many different doodle notes for our different units things can get pretty disorganized for some kids. This past school year I added science notebook tabs. For over 10 years my students have been keeping a detailed table of contents, and while there are advantages to this technique there are certainly drawbacks. I’m not sure if it was the kids or it was me but numbering pages and spending class time updating the contents just seemed tedious. I decided to chunk our notebooks into 5 sections using these printable tabs and I don’t think I will ever go back!
Labeling your Notebook Tabs
I decided on 5 notebook tabs for our 4 major science units (quarters) and a tab for warm-ups. On each tab I listed the biggest topics covered during that unit. I also included a label on both the front and back of the tab. Using our free interactive science notebook tabs template, you can customize these tabs for your own units, topics or quarters. You can also add a checklist of topics (as shown in the picture) or just add some blank lines for your students to write out the big ideas.
Printing/Cutting/Gluing
I printed the notebook tabs on card weight paper and they lasted my middle schoolers the entire year. Teens are pretty rough on their notebooks so I would advise against using normal, thinner paper for these tabs. Once printed, I cut the individual tabs out and glued in the warm-up tab to start. My students start class each day with a short science warm-up review question so I wanted to reserve the first 10 pages of their journal for doing this daily work. Next we glued in the quarter 1 notebook tab and then I waited until the start of the second unit to do tab number 2. I thought about pre-counting pages for each unit, but honestly some students write so much bigger and need more space so I opted to wait to glue notebook tabs until each unit started.
NOTE: It is important to emphasize that the first (light grey) line needs to line up with the edge of the page. The gap or white area is where the tab is folded over. This was a little challenging for the first tab, but the kids picked it up pretty quickly as the year went on!
These science notebook tabs were a success this year. They improved our notebook organization and saved valuable class time by replacing our table of contents. SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE RESOURCE LIBRARY if you would like a copy of this file to edit and use in your class! (Scroll the end of this post for the sign up.)
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Keep Calm and DOODLE ON,
