Description

The Student Notebook includes tips for writing good notes and helps them build their writing skills.

Students will learn to:

• Outline main concepts of a passage and list the minor concepts under the main ones.
• Use the author’s style to guide your notes. If the author defines a term, make sure you include that definition in your notebook.
• Compare and/or contrast two things using diagrams.
• Classify items referenced in the text.
• Write notes in your own words instead of copying text word for word. This helps you as the student make your own connections to the ideas you’re learning.
• Look up and define new or unknown words to help your build scientific vocabulary and better understand what you’re reading.

Improve Note Taking

The section in the Student Notebook where notes are recorded was created to give students prompts or questions to lead them to the important information they will read in the student textbook.

Although there is no one right way to take good notes, after trying the techniques in this notebook, students should find the way that works best for them. Then they’ll have a much better handle on all the interesting and amazing things they will learn in General Science this year.

We encourage students to evaluate their note-taking efforts after each exam. Were their notes helpful in the exam? If so, they are capturing important information. If not, they need to pull more information out of the textbook. Don’t worry, as they learn to evaluate and develop their note-taking, we help them there too.

Apologia encourages parents to review their student’s notebook to make sure that the student is properly engaged; however, student notes should never be graded. By the time your student finishes the course, you’ll see highlighting and colored fonts, personal thoughts expanded and explored, and developed strategies on how to personalize, capture, and transform new information into knowledge.

The General Science Student Notebook Includes:

• Suggested Daily Schedule
• Breakdown of daily assignments, detailing exactly what needs to be done each day
• Note-taking pages which include prompts to help teach the student how to identify and record important information from the text
• Space to answer the On Your Own questions that are listed in each module which serve as review and prep for the tests.
• Space to record their results from hands-on activities
• Creation Connection pages where students record their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reactions to what they are learning