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Hi I’m really indecisive and I’m trying to create an effective note making system for this year. Do you have any tips on how you take notes or use colours, post it notes or anything else? I'm hoping to do maths, science or language subjects if that makes a difference. Thank you! x
Hello!
Personally during high school I kept two notebooks per subject. In general, I used one of them (notebook A) to take notes during lessons, and the other (notebook B) to rewrite them at home adding information from textbooks and making sure I understood everything.
For maths I followed the lessons on my book and did most of the notes at home. I kept a notebook to write the theorems and explanations I had to study, and an other one to do all the exercises and problems.
For science I had lessons very full of information, so on one notebook (A) I would write really fast everything I could, and on the other (B) I would rewrite everything checking the textbook. When I saw the teacher was following my textbook pretty closely, I just underlined the parts she explained during the lesson and added the extra information she gave in the margins. Then I would write the notes assembling the underlined parts and the margin notes in a notebook (B). If there were any graphs I had to write, I would do that in a different color.
For language subject I’m n to sure what you mean… But if it’s literature, I took notes during lessons on sheets of paper and combined them at home with the information on the textbook in a notebook. If it’s a foreign language, I personally studied latin, and I had a notebook for grammar and one for exercise.
I used highlighters in my textbooks, and even though I didn’t exactly color-code, I did use different colors to underline concepts of different importance. For example, I would use a more visible color such as a green/blue/pink for the most important concepts, and a more subtle one, like yellow, for less important (but still important) things. If there were textbooks that I did not want to ruin, I underlined with a pencil and a ruler, using a double line or a zigzag line for more important things.
In my notes I use colors to write important words or concepts. It doesn’t really matter to me which color I use, but to keep my notes very clean I tend to use black and blue. I use a lot of colors when I condense a lot of information in a small amount of place, like on one sheet of paper. In that case I use different colors for different topics. For example if I want to condense information about macromolecules, I would use a color for carbohydrates, a color for proteins, a color for fats etc.
I only use post-its in my textbooks to find easily where certain topics are, but I don’t really use them in note taking.
I hope I was helpful!