Weekly Note-Taking Practice: Improve Your Reading, Listening, and Study Skills!

Completed by 78 learners

Ages 11-15

Live Group Class

Learn to take awesome, helpful notes while learning about the world around us!

Lizzie Grace, M.Ed.

Average rating:

5.0

Number of reviews:

(29 reviews)

Live video meetings

1x per week

1-10 learners per class

55 min

About Learning Overview Teacher Reviews

What's included

1 live meeting

55 mins in-class hours per week

Class Experience

Effective note-taking is a powerful skill for school and for life. When you can write good notes quickly, you will see your reading comprehension, listening skills, and grades improve dramatically. 

However, note-taking can be complicated! To take great notes, you need to learn to:
- Decide what information is important
- Use abbreviations and symbols to write quickly, while still making sure your notes can be understood later
- Use drawings and other visual elements to engage your whole brain in the note-taking process
- Organise your notes so that you can understand the big ideas, rather than just having a list of facts
- Think critically and record your own ideas as well as the content from the text
- Think about what you are reading/hearing AND listen at the same time
Most of all, you need lots of chances to practice these skills!

Each session of this ongoing class is structured as follows:
- A quick overview of how to take effective notes (an introduction for new students, and a review for returning students)
- Mini-lesson on the particular aspect of note-taking that is our main focus for that lesson. These techniques will be taught on rotation, so regular students will get to focus on all of them at some stage.
- Read an article or watch a video and take notes on it, following an I-do, we-do, you-do model.
- Follow-up activities to assess the usefulness of the notes we have taken. This might include sharing our notes, a quick quiz, or playing a game.

Learning Goals

- Students will develop their ability to process information through writing clear, concise notes.
- Students will build background knowledge by reading about a wide range of topics.

Other Details

Supply List

Students should have a pen and paper with them for taking notes. If students have a strong preference for typing their notes, they may do so, but research suggests that handwritten notes are more effective. Handwriting also allows students to use symbols in their note-taking. Note that this class does sometimes involve outside resources, such as Kahoot, to help students evaluate the quality of their notes.

External Resources

Learners will not need to use any apps or websites beyond the standard Outschool tools.

Meet the teacher

Lizzie Grace, M.Ed.

Joined July, 2020

5.0

29reviews

Profile

Teacher expertise and credentials

***PLEASE READ*** Hello! Unfortunately I am not offering any classes at the moment as I have returned to full-time classroom teaching. I will not be responding to class requests at this time. Please feel free to follow my profile to hear if and when I open new classes.


Hi! My name is Lizzie Grace, and I teach English and literacy classes from my home in Auckland, New Zealand. I have a bachelor's degree in English and Education, and a Masters of Education.

My mission is to help students read carefully, write clearly, and think deeply. I believe that these are some of the most important skills for doing great work and making the world a better place.

My most popular classes focus on building writing skills using a systematic, step-by-step method that demystifies writing great sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Students can try out parts of this method through my one-time classes, "Sparkling Sentences for Excellent Essays" and "Powerful Paragraphs for Excellent Essays," or they can work through the whole writing process in my eight-week course, "Argumentative Writing Step-By-Step."

I also offer writing-intensive literature classes. In these classes, we use writing and discussion to deepen our knowledge of the text and push us to think about the text in different ways. Students leave my literature classes not only with a strong understanding of the text, but with background knowledge that will serve them well in their future reading, and the ability to see connections between books and the world around them, as well as stronger writing skills.

Finally, I also offer one-on-one tutoring for middle and high school students. In these private sessions, I tailor our work to suit each student's individual strengths, weaknesses, and interests, so that every student can become a confident reader, writer, and thinker.