The Middle School Mouth. Teaching Social Studies. Every journey begins with a single step.
Notebooks begin with setting them up. I always take a full class day to set up my notebooks. I buy extra composition books to have on hand so that I can provide them (at cost) for students who haven’t brought them in – I want everyone setting them up at the same time. Interactive-notebooks - home. Social Studies Interactive Notebook: Set Up/Sensory Figure. All summer long I have been researching interactive notebooks and a lot of people use them for math and science, which I love!
Except I don't teach math or science... So my next best idea was social studies :o) Now I have all good intentions of keeping this going and squeezing social studies into our reading block as much as possible but let's call it what it is, it's not always easy. Our textbooks are a little outdated so a lot of the info we are compiling here is from a whole host of resources. For those of you who are unsure of what an interactive notebook is, it is a notebook (composition, spiral, or even a binder - whatever you choose) that allows students to be independent and creative writers and thinkers. Common core and best practices.