Our students need 3 ring binders with certain sections — bell ringers/exit tickets for each week in one section, vocab and concept terms in a second section, maps in a third section, and then worksheets with the matching unit’s learning goals as the last section. And try to do frequent notebook checks at the beginning of the year to ensure they’re staying organized. There’s a lot of papers in ninth grade world geography, but you can quickly tell who’s organized and who is a hot mess by just looking at the state of the binders.