Social Studies Interactive Notebooks - Yep, Again!

Here are some pictures of my social studies interactive notebook where I have been using lessons from InspirEd Educators to teach how ancient civilizations developed and failed along with our ancient Egypt interdisciplinary unit.

A full page graphic organizer folded and then taped into our notebook.  For social studies, I chose to use a composition notebook instead of a spiral notebook.  The way this is attached, students can still access the page and complete the activities.

This was a flow chart from InspirEd Educators Ancient Civilizations unit on how a civilization develops.

Quizzing students on what is really needed for a civilization to develop.

Another lesson from InspirEd Educators based on scenarios related to survival for an ancient civilization.

This is a simulation activity where students are "color" coded and have jobs to do.  Some students had to draw diamonds for basically no reward while a few others got credit for completed sheets, but had to count the diamonds, while an even smaller group was "paid" just for bossing all of the others around.  Students could see how different social classes came to be within a civilization.

Mapping ancient Egypt.  Students were enthralled with the fact that Lower Egypt is actually located "higher" than Upper Egypt.

Understanding the archaeology of ancient Egypt.

Learning about the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt.

Figuring out the bartering system of ancient Egypt.

More on My Social Studies Interactive Notebook

This post includes more pictures of my social studies interactive notebooks we have used this school year.  You will see most of the information in this post are foldables from Dinah Zike and mine is lacking color like the students. 

Global grid system notes

Maps versus globes Venn diagram

Parts of a map foldable

Vocabulary to accompany our textbook

Landforms found above and below sea level foldable

Types of landforms foldable

Cornell notes on South America from our textbook

This is a bad copy of the foldables notebook I used. Hope this helps all of those who were wondering where the book came from and what it looked like.

Inside my Social Studies Interactive Notebook

Some had mentioned they would like to see inside my social studies interactive notebook so I finally remembered to bring it home and snap some pictures.  It is not as creative as my language arts one!  I used some foldables from Dinah Zike, some I found online, and some great units from InspirEd Educators. 

This is my first year teaching social studies (in middle school, in my career, and in 6th grade).  I teach in NC and our state will be implementing the Common Core starting next school (2012-2013).  In addition, all of our other curriculums have changed to what they call Essential  Standards.  I was put on the Social Studies Essential Standards training team for our county. 

Needless to say, I was panicked and lost at the beginning of the school year.  I started out with the five themes of geography and landforms and then moved to South America which was found in our old textbook while we read The Cay in language arts class.  Since being put on the training team, the team was told after the first nine weeks that we were allowed encouraged to convert to the new essential standards curriculum.  With that came a complete loss for me.  I had no social studies materials to start with, but the change meant I had absolutely nothing, not even the old textbook.  I headed to the Internet to search for materials, lessons, actually anything I could get my hands on and discovered InspirED Educators. 

InspirEd Educators was like this amazing find for me (and in no way am I affiliated or paid to promote their products)!  They have several thematic units on ancient world history which is what our new essential standards is for 6th grade.  These lessons contain a variety of hands on activities, primary and secondary sources, whole group/small group lessons, research projects, and collaborative projects just to name a few. 

So...long story short:  my social studies notebooks started out more interactive but then became a place to glue all the lesson from InspirEd Educators as act as a textbook for social studies.  Here are a few pictures to get started.

The table of contents for my social studies interactive notebook.

Five Themes of Geography flip book foldable.  We took notes on each tab for that theme.  Notice the capital/bold letters spell MR. HELP...this was our acronym to help remember the five themes (found on the Internet somewhere).

One of the tabs from our Five Themes of Geography flip book foldable.

Longitude and latitude foldable using a paper plate and then glued into our notebooks.

Here is the paper plate foldable unfolded in our notebook.

More on Interactive Notebooks

I am going to post a few more pictures of my language arts interactive notebook that I took a couple of weeks ago.  I have been posting a few with each blog, but am going to post several more of them on this entry.   It has been what seems like a long week, so I am going to KISS this post!  That is an acronym I teach my students:  Keep It Short and Simple.  We KISS a lot of stuff when appropriate!


This is a double bubble map we used while reading The Cay by Theodore Taylor.

This is a summarization strategy I found online call "the incredible shrinking notes" where students start out writing a summary of a reading selection on the large index card.  Students are then given the medium sized card and have to take the information from the large card and condense it onto the medium sized card.  Finally, students are given the small card and must then take the information from the medium sized card and condense it down either further onto the small card.  This is a great way for students to get to the main point/idea of a selection.

This is a brief biography of Theodore Taylor we glued in our notebooks when we were reading The Cay, one of his awesome books that can be integrated into either the study of South America or Central America or World War II.  It also has great examples of dialect.

This is a foldable on poetry terms.

Notes on figurative language with some color coding to make the notes user friendly.

Poetry notes also color coded to make them easier to use and more helpful.

More poetry notes...notice an example is created with each type of poem so students have a reference point to refer to when needed.  Once I teach poetry, it is fair game to require students to respond to any type of reading in poetry form.  I teach poetry between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year, which gives students an opportunity to use their poetry skills for the whole second semester.

Another page of poetry notes.

Our last page of poetry notes.  Note the "I Am" poem rules taped into student notebooks and then our class example written underneath. 

We used "Winter Morning Poem" and a sheet of generic poetry analysis questions to aid in comprehension.  The questions are taped into the notebook so when students open them, they can see both poem and questions/answers together.

This is just another poem where we were marking the rhyme scheme, lines, and stanzas. 

Awesomeness with a Punch...

A crafty friend of mine made my day when she told me she had a Stampin' Up Round Tab punch that she would sell me!  Sounds crazy, right?  Well...I am quite an organizational nerd and saw a notebook on pinterest (enough said about that) with these cool colored index tabs used in a notebook.  It was like love at first sight and upon digging a little into the "pin" as one must do, I found that these awesome tabs were created with a punch (much like a hole puncher).  So then my mission became finding one.  I checked the Stampin' Up webpage and eBay, but before ordering from either place I put a plea out on facebook.  I knew I had many crafty friends and one responded willing to part with her punch...so now that bad boy is MINE and I am so very excited about it.  I know it is weird or crazy or even uncool to be this excited over an index tab, but I just can't help it - it is one more way for me to help my students get organized. 

Here is my teacher interactive notebook for social studies.  And to the right of my notebook is pure awesomeness in a small little punch.  You can see the shape it makes and then it is folded in half, with a page glued/sandwiched between it, and then labeled.  Like magic, we have the coolest index tabs for our notebooks with little cost.  I have 27 students in each of my classes and was able to punch enough tabs from ONE sheet of cardstock for the entire class!  I think that is just pure genius!

This is just a picture of my amazing punch turned upside down.

My notebook with a close-up of the index tabs in place and labeled.  I am not the best photgrapher, but my phone takes much better pictures than my digital camera.

Student notebooks for social studies with their index tabs in place.  Many of them wouldn't admit it, because it is so uncool, but they pretty much thought these tabs were pretty much as EPIC as I did!

Interactive Notebooks - Again

We have been busy this week reading a novel and have been using our social studies interactive notebooks so I have neglected my language arts one this week.  Have I mentioned that I love my interactive notebooks and truly believe that my students are happy to have such a structured approach to learning.  AND...that they have a valuable resource to refer back to when needed.  I also love the fact that pages are not falling out of their notebooks or have just simply disappeared (those are some of the problems I had when using binders and having students place notes in these binders). 

I am a very visual learner, so I am going to include a few more pictures in this short but sweet post.  I am reminded of an acronym I have been using with my students when working on summarizing...KISS It!  Keep It Short and Simple.  I learned of this acronym when I did a stint for AT&T before landing a real teaching job. 

No laughing at my horrible artwork please...it is the content we are interested in viewing!

This is a notes page about the Elements of a Short Story...notice how each page is titled and dated. We start off day one and number each page. Each time we complete an entry in our notebooks, the date and title are entered as well.

This is a Sensory Figure I found at Mrs. Gannon's Wordpress site.  She has a bunch of pages dedicated to interactive notebooks and social studies.  Remember...I am not an artist! I put many things like this in my notebook so my students can refer back to them as needed throughout the school year.  After discovering Pinterest, I realized these would be considered types of anchor charts.

This is a foldable created using the 12 Powerful Words.  This is a list of words that occur most often on student questions, especially test.  I tried to get a picture of a couple of the tabs lifted where you can see the word on top and the definition is under that flap.

This is a list of sample character traits I found and we glued in our notebooks.  This is a great "thinking started" for students when they are stumped.  My students probably refer back to this page more than any other in their notebook. 

This is just a set of questions related to the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros.  I found this idea somewhere on the web to create the questions in a strip that were glued to the side of the page (can be either on the left or right - on the right here so it doesn't cover up the holes of the notebook page).  Students were required to answer the questions in a complete sentence - this is the page where I modeled that expectation.

This just shows a page where we took notes (8 Ways Characters are Revealed) and we still had 1/2 a page leftover.  So...at some point we needed to add a list of common helping verbs in their notebook.  Why waste space, right?  We just cut the longer list in half and glued it to this "free" space in our notebooks.

Just some notes on theme, but wanted to show that when mistakes are made, we just cross them out and keep on rolling. 

Just a horrible graphic organizer where students were telling about different aspects of their life.  This was in conjunction with reading Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli.  This is his autobiography.

This is a close activity on the Elements of Autobiography.  It is a good idea, but is too crowded.  Next year, this will be divided into two pages and have more room for students to write.  This was created during the whole left side reflection/right side input side.  Like I reported in an earlier post, I scrapped that idea and just use the next available page - what a great revelation this was for me!

Logistics of Interactive Notebooks

After reading all of the information available online about interactive notebooks, I gave them a shot a couple of years ago.  The concept made sense to me, but some of the rules did not.  My first year I tried the left/right scenario where teacher input was on the right and student input was on the left.  That honestly did not make sense to me, but we made it that first year with that concept.  Last year, I did the same left/right set-up, but I switch it to make more sense in my little brain.  The left side was for learning and the right side was for reflecting.  In my small world classroom, that made more sense to me.

I still struggled keeping students on the same page since some students write bigger or smaller than others and some had college ruled notebooks while others had wide ruled notebooks (next year, I am requesting all college ruled).  I went to the NC Middle School Conference (my team won Region 6 Team of the Year) and attended an interactive notebook session for science.  I know I don't teach science, but was hoping to get some goodies to convert for language arts.  It was like EUREKA because I came away with one little tidbit of information that completely changed my frustration level with keeping students on the same page.  How? you may ask:  students tape/glue in an extra sheet of paper on the page where they are working somehow if they run out of space devoted to a particular assignment.  It was GENIUS. 

Then this year, I scrapped the whole left/right side idea and we just use the next available page for whatever we want to put in our notebooks.  This process has worked so much better for us this year.  I make a conscious effort to keep pages together so students can see lessons/notes laid out next to their reflections they are creating.  We still add extra pages if needed when I devote 2 pages to notes/ideas and it takes them 3 or more.  Sometimes, I even have to add extra pages in my own notebook as I wrote bigger than expected or did not plan enough pages in the beginning.  This just allows for modeling and for students to see that it is okay to add more pages if necessary.


Below is a notes page on plot from my teacher notebook.  

 Another page of notes from my teacher notebook below. 

Below is a picture of my teacher notebook where we were taking genre notes.  You can see where I ran out of room on my two allotted pages and attached another page with tape to extend our working area. This is taped so that it folds into the notebook (from the far right toward the spiral spine).   

Langage Arts and Interactive Notebooks

I created a post-it note poster to use for students to understand the concept of a new word.  I put our headings packet on www.teacherspayteachers.com.  Since this is my first addition to TpT, it is free.  I hope to add other things to TpT focusing on using interactive notebooks in language arts.  There are many things out there for science, social studies, and math; but have not found many notebook ready/worthy ideas for language arts/reading.

Watch this blog for future updates about using interactive notebooks in language arts classes.  Since discovering the concept online a couple of years ago, it has become my best friend.  I love how organized the notebook keeps students and they all of their resources at their fingertips.  This is especially important as we move to Common Core for language arts and Essential Standards for social studies (I teach in NC) without the slightest hint of getting any new resources.  Since this is my first year EVER teaching social studies, the interactive notebook is a great place to resources for students to refer throughout the year. I think I should invest some of my money in glue stick stock...since we use it almost daily!

Watch for future updates with pictures from our language arts interactive notebooks.