Color With Purpose (CWP)

If you've been looking into interactive notebooks (or been doing them) for any amount of time, you have probably come across the idea of "color with purpose" before. For the last year I had used this occasionally, but this semester I am really trying to use colors and highlighting whenever possible to try to show the connection between different things. 

Today I thought I would share a couple lessons where I feel like adding the color really helped. 

First, I borrowed the foldable I heard about from Math = Love, who got it from another blog.You can download a copy of the foldable here from In Stillness the Dancing. My tweak? Make it stoplight colors.


Red - They always need to ask the question

Yellow - If they answer yes they need to proceed with caution and follow the steps in the foldable

Green - Good to go on to the next step!

Second, I really liked how my pages on writing inequalities and solving from word problems went. Here's what it looked like:

I had the students choose four different colors to write with. Then we used each color to represent an inequality and take notes. In the middle of the foldable there were simple inequalities that they underlined the important phrase in the corresponding color (i.e. for my foldable, I would underline "is under" in blue and then right the corresponding inequality making sure I used a "less than" symbol)

I thought this went really well. Then the students worked on a worksheet where they used the same color-coding to identify what symbol to use. 

What have you done recently to incorporate more interactive notes like highlighting, color, or underlining?