The Middle School Mouth. Interactive Notebooks | 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. I usually start by having the students respond to a prompt – would anyone describe you as organized? Why or why not? Now that the students have the idea, I teach them how to glue things in to the notebooks.
The drawback was it was a lot of paper, a lot of glue, and a lot of time. This year, I decided that I would put all the notebook assignments in a table format that we would keep in a binder with their agenda. I actually really like the table format and I am interested to see how it will work out this year. Assignment Table I usually close the set up the notebook lesson by having students create a personal title page. That’s the setup day. 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 Our textbooks are a little outdated so a lot of the info we are compiling here is from a whole host of resources.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. Each notebook is specific to each teacher and there are many different ways to set it up. Take a look at some of these great websites for more ideas!
I set mine up where the left side is for learning and the right side is for the student's response or reflection. Sabra. Common core and best practices.