Description
Apologia Student Notebooks are designed to help your student get all they can out of this biology course. Included in the Student Notebooks are pages where your student will record their notes and responses to all of the On Your Own questions, and at the end of each module, Study Guide questions will help them review the materials and prepare for tests. To ensure they learn the most they can from their labs, the experiments in the textbook are also in the Student Notebook. There are also bonus materials found only in the Student Notebook that walk students through the entire process of designing and performing their own experiments.
Build Writing Skills
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 you build scientific vocabulary and better understand what you’re reading.
Improve Note Taking
Taking good notes can make the difference between your student mastering a concept and not entirely understanding it. So when your student does develop this skill, they can stay focused on their reading, increase their retention, and connect new ideas to ones they already know.
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 text.
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 Advanced Biology Student Notebook contains:
- A daily schedule
- Note-taking pages
- Instruction in the Cornell note-taking system Space to answer all study questions found in the textbook
- Lab report forms for each experiment in the text will help your student master the process of writing a complete lab report
- Illustrations that are not found in the textbook which ensure that the student is indeed learning all that they can from their labs
- “Design Your Own Experiment” section walks students through the steps involved in designing and conducting their own experiments
