Last year I had my students put together Interactive Notebooks in my AP CSP class. I wanted to make sure students had a place to document their learning as well as something to study from come the the AP test. I had students all get composition notebooks and then we took notes AFTER we did the activities from this curriculum. I wanted them to do the activities first and vocabulary last, but I wanted to make sure we had a place to store this vocab.
Below are links for the resources for units 1, 3, and 4. I hope to do 2 and 5 this year but everything else you need should be linked here (print outs, examples, etc).
This is great!!! I really struggled last year with “note taking” and when it came time for the exam I felt like I had to print a bunch of resources for my students to study from because they didn’t have one notebook. I am definitely going to use this. I planned on adding some journaling to my classes this year and now they can do it write in their notebook too… keeping it all together!
Thanks for sharing! I’ll keep you updated on what I change/add/etc.
That’s awesome! Do you know how you plan on incorporating journaling? Are you going to use questions in the lesson plans or do you have different structure you have students use? I am always looking for better ways to get students journaling. This year I am thinking I need to use more sentence starters to speed up the process.
Thanks so much for posting this! I’m planning on doing INB as well for the same reasons.
I was thinking about having them put in the vocabulary in the back of the notebook.
Maybe reserve 10 sheets for that.i did INBs last year with my Science class and loved it.
Since this is AP I need to make sure it’s not to make a pretty notebook but a serious place to store our good info we need for 5/11.
We should dream up a good way to share our INB sources as we go this year.
Kaitie,
Thank you! I am ready to use your resources. I haven’t used anything with the students yet, but I enjoyed the sentence frames and concrete review strategies for myself. This will make interacting with the notes so easy.
Well I haven’t ever done journaling before (I’m from a math teacher background) but it was highly recommended at the AP Summer Institute I went to. Some of the prompt ideas they had were:
What were you surprised by today?
What were your take away’s from today’s class?
What were some difficulties you encountered in class today? (in regards to programming)
I was thinking of trying to incorporate a lot of current events with the topics we are covering. So if a DDoS attack happens asking them to respond about how they thought about the current event differently knowing what they know about DDoS attacks now? Or something like that if that makes sense!
Katie- thanks for sharing this. I would like to start this for Unit 2. I’m not sure how far along you are but, if there is way you could share your Unit 2, I would very much appreciate it. Again, thanks for sharing your strategies with us!
Hi @stevensonj I have a few things in place for unit 2 but this is VERY MUCH a work in progress. Also, given the bit of re-design in unit 2 that came out last week, I am not sure how much I will add to Unit 2, Chapter 2.
Hopefully this will help for now. In the “Table of Contents” there are the links to the notes pages I have students do. Maybe when I have some time (probably June…) I will be able to clean this up a bit. ALSO, I would love to see what you add to it!
@kaitie_o_bryan Thank you Katie! I love the interactive journal idea. I have the students journal online in a google document. I am going to add/teach them to add the table of contents to it. That is a great idea for them to have handy for review. I am currently teaching Unit 3 and loved your Top Down Design examples. Am going to review that with the students today. Will post one of their responses after class. Awesome resources.
Thanks! I just did the top down examples with my students the other day too - I think it helped a ton! They do that “snowflake” warm up where they learn about top down design but my students didn’t really apply top down design correctly the first time around (they just wrote down the code, not the function names).
In the notebooks, they had to think a lot more about what they would do AND when I told them these were scenes created by students last year, it set a higher bar for them to do better this year
I had my students assemble the Interactive Notebook for Unit 1. We have moved on to Unit 2, and I was going to have them work on it. There is one foldable that you have that I can’t seem to figure out. It’s the “Numbers Text Colors” one. Can you provide some guidance please?
I’m going to keep them in the classroom to cut down on “I lost my notebook” excuses!