Scaffolded Notes

This year I have started creating scaffolded notes for my class over any important topics we cover. In the past I have asked them to take notes when I’m teaching new concepts, but that skill is hard for some students. You’re also never sure they are getting the most important points you’re making when they take their own notes. I also discovered that they never tended to pull those notes out ever again.

Due to all of this, I decided to start doing scaffolded notes with all levels of my classes. Scaffolded notes are notes with words removed and blanks inserted that they have to fill in as you teach. I used to use Power Points to teach on certain weeks but not all. This year I’m blessed with a classroom with a huge TV I can show the Power Points on, so I’m using them each week for all my classes. This is perfect because I put the notes into the Power Point so that they can follow along and know what to write in their blanks. This is also helpful for dyslexic kids and those who struggle with spelling. Scaffolded notes help greatly with engagement and holding the attention of those with attention problems and all students really.

This may seem intimidating because it’s extra work, but it really isn’t. When I do my lesson planning I make my Power Point and type what I want them to know on the slides. Then I can copy the information from the slides onto Canva as a notes document. Then I make a copy of those notes and remove a few key words and replace them with blanks. That becomes the scaffolded notes, and then I use the notes to teach from. I am very intentional in the amount of words and which words I replace with blanks. I want to have enough blanks to keep the students engaged but not so many that they are so stressed filling in the blanks that they aren’t paying attention to my teaching. Therefore, I remove the words I believe are most important in the hopes that by writing those words as they fill in the blanks will help them enter into their long term memory. This has worked so well for all levels of my classes.

Another benefit is that since as teachers in homeschool tutorials we are partners with parents, the parents can refer to these notes to see what we’re covering in class in order to reinforce it or to use in helping them with their homework. The more we embrace parents as our partners, the better education we can provide for our students.

My favorite thing has been how this impacted my planning and teaching. First- hypothetically speaking- if I somehow forget exactly what I taught in class or what I taught to which class I can refer to these for specifics, not that I EVER forget things like that, of course…. Additionally, when I’m assigning homework I know that they have these notes to refer to in any way needed. This has been really helpful when I want to review things we have covered in previous weeks. For example, if I taught them about similes and metaphors and then a few weeks later I ask them to include some in their writing I can tell them to refer back to their notes if they needed help remembering what they were. I’ve also found myself on more than one occasion asking them to pull past notes out and using them in a new lesson.

Pardon the terrible pun, but having these at their fingertips has really allowed us to scaffold new learning onto old lessons and therefore go deeper into our subject.