As I transitioned from the primary dual language grades to intermediate dual language, I began to think about how student notebooks and folders would be organized and their role in comparison. How would my students organize their subject areas? How would we implement notebooks, binders and folders for use in both classrooms? Well, we began thinking about math. Math has an extremely important focus in every grade and honestly, it’s my favorite subject to teach (and was my favorite subject to learn when I was in school!). What I love about math as a dual language educator is that it has so many cognates in English and in Spanish. It is truly a subject where students can more easily learn and retain academic vocabulary because of the richness in cognates. In dual language classrooms that is helpful for both groups of students – your native English speakers and your native Spanish speakers.
To have students organize their math notes, we decided to implemented a bilingual interactive math notebook. Their math notebook would be utilized for students to take notes during the math mini-lesson and then to add these interactive math notebook pages that went along with each of our standards and lessons. An important feature of these pages is that the math standard and objective is stated right on the page in Spanish or English so students have a reminder of the target for that particular lesson.
The students would use their notebook in the classroom they were in that day, and the next day we would briefly review the concepts of the previous day. Having their notebooks helped students be able to explain and transfer the knowledge from one language to the other.
For dual language classrooms interactive math notebooks allow students to curate a progression of not only their academic content acquisition but also of their academic vocabulary acquisition. During the mini-lessons the information is scaffolded because students take notes however they want – visually, just words – and that helps each individual child process and “understand” the information better. Having the notebooks used in both classrooms also provided the children a continuation, a fluidity among the rooms that showed them how easily transferable so much of the information they were learning truly was.
If you’re interested in implementing interactive math notebooks in your 4th grade classroom, check out my pack in Spanish: Cuaderno interactivo de matemáticas (4to grado)