I am going to post a few more pictures of my language arts interactive notebook that I took a couple of weeks ago. I have been posting a few with each blog, but am going to post several more of them on this entry. It has been what seems like a long week, so I am going to KISS this post! That is an acronym I teach my students: Keep It Short and Simple. We KISS a lot of stuff when appropriate!  This is a double bubble map we used while reading The Cay by Theodore Taylor. This is a summarization strategy I found online call "the incredible shrinking notes" where students start out writing a summary of a reading selection on the large index card. Students are then given the medium sized card and have to take the information from the large card and condense it onto the medium sized card. Finally, students are given the small card and must then take the information from the medium sized card and condense it down either further onto the small card. This is a great way for students to get to the main point/idea of a selection. This is a brief biography of Theodore Taylor we glued in our notebooks when we were reading The Cay, one of his awesome books that can be integrated into either the study of South America or Central America or World War II. It also has great examples of dialect. This is a foldable on poetry terms. Notes on figurative language with some color coding to make the notes user friendly. Poetry notes also color coded to make them easier to use and more helpful. More poetry notes...notice an example is created with each type of poem so students have a reference point to refer to when needed. Once I teach poetry, it is fair game to require students to respond to any type of reading in poetry form. I teach poetry between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year, which gives students an opportunity to use their poetry skills for the whole second semester. Another page of poetry notes. Our last page of poetry notes. Note the "I Am" poem rules taped into student notebooks and then our class example written underneath. We used "Winter Morning Poem" and a sheet of generic poetry analysis questions to aid in comprehension. The questions are taped into the notebook so when students open them, they can see both poem and questions/answers together. This is just another poem where we were marking the rhyme scheme, lines, and stanzas.