5 Steps to Setting Up Social Studies Interactive Notebooks

Kirsten 0:00

This is the social studies teacher podcast a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know if you southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

Hey, there today we're going to be talking about how you can set up your interactive notebooks for social studies at the first school that I worked with, for a time, interactive notebooks were required for us in all subjects. But I learned that it was actually really useful to utilize in social studies, especially because a lot of the information was content heavy, it was not the same as reading where you learn a set amount of skills during a certain period of time, and you're just reviewing it throughout the year. Social Studies was different because you had a variety of topics that you were teaching students that were pretty new all year long. So it was really great for students to reference throughout the year was a great way to take notes and keep track of everything that they were learning in social studies. So that's why I wanted to bring this on the podcast so that you can do this in your own classroom. So in this episode, I'm just going to be going through the steps walking you through what we did, what I did to prep what students did, and how you can kind of make it your own. So take what you'd need. Maybe you want to add more things, maybe you want to cut back on some things, but use this as a guide to help set up social studies notebooks for your classroom.

Now, the first thing is, when might you need to set up social studies, notebooks. This is a great time to do on the first week of school, first few days of school. And actually me and my other co teachers who were teaching science and math, that we that was what we did pretty much the first couple of days of school with routines and procedures, it was just easy to just do that. It's not too hard, you know, it's easy to kind of step in when they're getting into school, instead of going straight into learning going full force getting them you know, kind of prepped, you know, so giving them that ability to set up their notebooks is a really great first couple of days activity. And depending on how fast your students work It can last for one day you can do with the first day of school or you can, maybe if you're ELA social studies like I was, we would be doing our ELA notebook on the first day and the social studies notebook on the second day. So you can decide when during the first week of school, you can set them up. You also want to give them some time to decorate and complete each step, so that their notebooks are ready to go for the whole school year. Because once you set it up, that's pretty much it, you don't have to do anything else. And also, very rarely, would we be so full in our notebooks that we would have to go get another one unless they took a lot of notes. So we really just use that one notebook throughout the whole entire year. And I should start with like what supplies you might need, or you might have students need. This is good for a spiral notebook, your typical one subject spiral notebook, 70 sheets, or 140 pages. And you can also use this with a composition notebook. I find that composition notebooks are a little bit sturdier. But you can use the ones that are 70, or I think they're probably like 100 sheets, so 200 pages. So those are the two that you might want to use. If you already have your students bringing in supplies, I would just have whatever notebook, however many notebooks they have, then I would just take one of those, make sure you use one of those for social studies. If you ever do this on the second or third day of school, what you can do for their homework for the first day is have students bring in pictures or stickers or things they like to decorate their notebooks that would be their very first day of school homework is to bring things, bring pictures in from home, bring stickers in from home so that they can use it in class to decorate their notebooks. But of course, you want to provide some options just in case not everybody can do that. So the first step is you can get some paper, you can use regular white paper, you can use Astro brights, and just cut it to the size to fit the cover of the notebook. Another thing you would need are some tabs. Here's a fun hack. It's I mean, I don't know if it's fun. But just if you have any Avery labels like regular name labels, what I did was I had students use those as tabs. And so you'll need to have those for each student. Okay, so that's pretty much what you need, you're going to need some type of notebook cover or paper. And then you're going to need two sticky note labels for each one. So in their social studies journal, this is really up to them, you can decorate it collage style, you can have students bring in pictures of their family are things that they love, or stickers, they can decorate with stickers however they want to do it. But one thing you want to make sure they have is like social studies notebook or social studies journal on the front and their name on the front as well. But other than that, they can pretty much decorate it however they want on that little paper. And then all you have to do is glue the covers to the front of their notebooks. For extra protection, I recommend using some clear packing tape and or self seal laminating sheets. Those are really handy as well just got to be careful because if you're like me, I'm so terrible with like things that are super like because it'll just crinkle and crease. So I just find it easy for me to just use packing tape because I am less likely to make a mistake on those. But you would believe it or not decorating the front of their notebook could take a whole class period in itself. So that's one day right there, depending on how much time you want to give them. But just give them some time to like make the social studies notebook their own.

All right, I know that was a lot of information, a lot of moving pieces. But I want to make it easy for you. And so that's why I created a easy resource where you can actually have the notebook covers and tabs already done for you. So I've posted this in my TPT store. It's just called Social Studies, interactive notebook covers. And it'll also give you some steps for these specific notebooks. I have eight different styles with different icons on it. So it's really easy to print it out, have students decorate it. And it'll walk you step by step in the process of setting up their social studies, notebooks. So you can DIY like I've done for many years.

And I also have this extra bonus resource for you. If you're interested in grabbing that you just click in the link in my description. And you can go to the TPT page and see those interactive notebook covers there. All right, well, that is the end of this episode. I hope this is helpful to you. And you can use one or more or all of these steps to set up your interactive notebooks for the year. It's really great not just for social studies, but really any subject where you have students taking notes. This is especially important in upper elementary, it's building those skills for middle school, it's one less thing they have to worry about to catch up in. So I recommend starting as early as third grade for note taking.

All right, well, that's the end. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week. I'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.