Happy Mid-Summer

Happy middle of the summer (already)!



I have decided since I am moving to our middle school and into 6th grade Social Studies that I would start blogging to share my teaching ideas and keep track of them for myself.
Hopefully I will remember to update pretty frequently and maybe someone out there will find something I post useful. I know that I have found lots of great ideas from other teachers' blogs.
Since I live/teach in Pennsylvania I will be teaching the Western Hemisphere to my 6th graders. I am actually really excited about it since I have been going through the book. 

Interactive Notebooks

I decided that I am going to have my students create/keep interactive notebooks for class. I have been looking into a lot of different resources online and decided that it will be a lot of work (more for me than them), but very beneficial to the students.  Everything they need will be in one place and they will get to put their own creative twist on the notes that they'll have to take.



In case you haven't heard of interactive notebooks I highly recommend looking into it for almost any grade and subject.  There are lots of options for doing it....writing notes on right side of the page and students can turn it into drawings/graphic organizers/etc. on the left side of the page, creating different graphic organizers that can be drawn in, graphic organizers students tape or paste in, mini flip charts, tri-fold charts, and the list goes on and on!



I am going to try to post pictures of all the different things I'm going to have my students draw/write/paste into their notebooks so hopefully you can get some ideas.  Eventually I will hopefully get them up on teacherspayteachers.com so other people can use them if they're interested in it.



Okay, I am done writing my first blog and am going to go back to starting to plan ideas for their lessons and notebooks. :)