Sat Aug 30, 2014 6:20 pm (PDT) . Posted by:
alysiahumphries
Most people don't naturally know how to take notes well unless they have an example. Which is why we were taught to model note taking for the students, using a whiteboard. During lectures we had one person teaching and another mentor taking notes on the board. We asked the kids to take out their note papers at the beginning so they would know to take notes.
One side of the board was for summarizing ideas/keywords, the other side was for personal thoughts and questions that came up from the class members in the course of discussion.
You could also do a quadrant for vocabulary words that come up. (This was taught to us by our trainer Aneladee). You might teach the kids to make these sections on their papers whenever taking notes. I have also seen bookmarks made by various TJEd sources that have 3 sections for these 3 areas, usually with just space for a page number or reference number where the longer thoughts are written. So the bookmark doesn't hold the notes but it keeps a record of them .
When we modeled this in class, at first the kids mostly copied what we wrote into their notes , but we tried to encourage them to write down their own thoughts, and we lessened the amount of writing on the board we did gradually throughout the semester so that their notes would come more from themselves . I do think some of the kids probably stopped taking notes at that point since they knew we weren't looking at their notes , so asking if anyone had things to share from their notebooks later might have helped
Novel/Book Annotation:
When I'm taking notes in a book and not on a lecture, I just write my thoughts in the margins and sometimes create a key in the back where I can find page numbers with my thoughts and what topic. . I think showing them exiles of commonplace books and getting them excited about creating something lasting they can leave their mark on could be very inspiring .
