Social Studies

I have gotten a few questions about how I teach/plan/grade Social Studies, so I wanted to answer all of your questions in one place and provide you with some helpful resources in case you are in need!

We don't have a specific Social Studies textbook or series that we follow, so I plan my instruction using the curriculum maps and standards that are put out by my county. To plan each unit I look at the standards, vocabulary, essential questions, and enduring understandings and organize them into sections. Then I look through all of the resources that I have and plan how to teach each section. I use a combination of Brainpop videos, research on Ducksters, picture books, and more to plan each lesson. Since we use so many different resources, I try to make a "notebook" for each unit so that students can keep all of their notes from the whole unit in one place. I usually send the notebook home as a tool to help students study for the unit assessment and to show parents what we have been working on at school.

We just wrapped up our Civics and Government unit, so I thought I would share the notebook that I created and the resources that I used to teach each lesson in this unit.

Almost all of the pages in this notebook correspond with videos on Brainpop Junior. If you have your own account, you can assign the videos and quizzes to your students. If you have a school account, you can play the videos on your SMARTboard/TV/Whatever you use to project. One great feature of Brainpop is that they provide a transcript of every video, so sometimes I will have my class watch a video all together and then give them copies of the transcript so they can search for the information that they need to fill out their notebook pages.

When Brainpop does not have the video that I need for a specific standard, my next go-to resource is Ducksters.com. Ducksters is a kid-friendly, educational site where students can find information about history, science, geography, and more. Brainpop did not have a video that went into great detail about Democracy, so I created a QR code of the Ducksters page about Democracy and had them use their iPads to visit the site, read, and complete the Democracy page. Ducksters also has a feature at the bottom of each page that will read the entire page out loud, which is a HUGE help for my lower readers and for kids who struggle to read informational text on their own!

Once students complete an entire notebook, I send it home, along with a study guide, to help them prepare for the test. I try to make all of my tests very straightforward and mostly multiple choice so that my kids who get read-aloud and/or have writing accommodations don't fall behind! Click the picture below to grab a free copy of my Civics and Government Study Guide & Assessment.