Students in elementary school and beyond often do writing projects that involve research. Research is a great way to combine both reading and writing strategies. However, it can often be challenging for students if they do not have good note taking strategies for gathering and organizing the information they found. Having pages of random notes with no clear organization is a pain to make sense of.
One of the important skills that students need to learn when researching to write about a topic is to take notes. Gathering information is tough, and you don’t want to have to read over something many times to try to remember the information in it. Being able to take notes effectively in a way that serves to help organize the information gathered is key in learning to do research without frustration.
There are three main note taking strategies for upper elementary that I like to use with my students to help them research and organize their information effectively.
LINEAR NOTES WITH MAIN IDEA
The first method I use is to take notes linearly, while still focusing on a main idea. This makes it so that the notes sections aren’t completely random, and information is placed into specific places that are easy to find again. This is not my favorite, because it is still difficult to move information around, but it is easy for students to grasp initially. You can also do this in outline form. See how I teach outlines with short nonfiction text here.
To start, students should first think of a few categories of information about whatever they’ll be researching to help give them an idea of how to classify the facts that they find.
STICKY NOTE NOTES
The second method is to use sticky notes. An advantage to sticky notes, of course, is that they can be moved around. As they read, students place one fact on each sticky note. When they’re done, they can place them on a sheet of paper to hold them in place.
The advantage to using sticky notes to take notes is their ease of organization. Simply move them around and line them up until the order makes sense to form paragraphs.
INDEX CARD NOTES
Using index cards is one of my favorite note taking strategies to use while teaching research. I know it’s been a popular method for ages, but there are a few things that I like for my students to include on their cards in order for them to help make the process smooth. Here is the overall format that I use:
I start out by having students think of categories that they can place their research into. They can add categories as they go, but having something to start with is helpful. Then, they write this category onto the top right corner of EVERY CARD. This helps tremendously with organization later on, so that they do not end up with 100 cards that they have to completely sort through later. Tip: to make it quicker, have students assign each category a number. Then they can just write the number on the card.
When having students research from multiple sources, I ask students to write the source (title, author, or URL) on the back of each card. This tells me where they got the information. More importantly, it also lets them refer back to the original source if they need more information or need to clarify something in their notes.
This is my favorite part. When most of the research is done and students are ready to organize the research, have students separate their cards into categories using the number written in that upper right hand corner. Then they take each category, and work on creating an order out of the cards that might flow into a smooth paragraph. Cards are super easy to move around and reorder. This makes it perfect because your students don’t have to erase or rewrite anything.
OVERALL RESEARCH TIPS
- Remind students to not write full sentences in their notes. To avoid plagiarism, I ask students to only write phrases as they take notes. Then when they turn the phrases back into sentences in their own writing, it helps to change them from the original.
- With any method, give students a way to keep track of their notes in a folder, binder clips, etc.
CHECK OUT THESE RESEARCH PROJECTS
Click on the pictures below to check out two complete research writing projects that utilize some of the techniques listed above.
