I want to spend some time this week teaching my 7th grade students how to take their own meaningful notes from their science textbook. Does anyone teach SQ3R or Cornell note taking? Is one more effective than the other? I was thinking about teaching SQ3R, but I wanted to see if I could get some opinions first.
I would appreciate any ideas or advice you have on the topic!!
I know that I was preparing a lesson on 2 column note taking and my son who was in middle school at the time saw them and said, "Oh, that's just like Cornell". There is a template available and during our training they taught us about it. I drew a line and divided the paper into 1/3 and 2/3. In the 1/3 section, you would put the main idea or topic, in the 2/3 side, you would explain.
We did a lot of highlighting before using the Step Up colors. The greens would be the topic of the notes. The yellows would be on the left 1/3 side and the reds were put on the 2/3 right side of the paper.
I just googled sq3r to refresh my memory--survey, question, read, recite and review!!
Step up is a tool to teach writing. It simplifies the process so that basically anyone--even as young as kinder can produce a paragraph. They won't be really creative or Pulitzer prize worthy, but you can have a 6 year old write someting like;
I like ice cream. First I like vanilla. It is white and creamy. Next, I like chocolate. Chocolate is one of my favorites. Last, I like cookie dough. I like the lumps of dough. Clearly, I like ice cream.
Each part of the paragraph is color coded. Green means topic sentence and conclusion. Yellow means: detail and red means: stop--tell me more.
I really like it. But like I said, it's not great for creative writing.
I can say..that I had never really done anything with note taking since middle school. And was introduced to Cornell Note Taking during my senior year of college and absolutly hated it..I just thought it was so much more work then anything else I had learned.
