Geography worksheets aren’t always fun, but turn them into stations to make learning geography terms fun! Geography stations can make an often challenging concept or skill fun and meaningful for students. These nine geography stations can be used for a whole group lesson or for centers during social studies. I have to say it was one of the best geography lesson I’ve ever taught! There are two different versions of these geography worksheets: one for GA teachers and one for almost any social studies teacher. The centers consisted of nine different geography activities that are all listed on th ..read more

Geography statins can make an often challenging concept or skill fun and meaningful for students. These nine geography stations can be used for a whole group lesson or for centers during social studies. I have to say it was one of the best geography lesson I’ve ever taught! There are two different versions of these geography stations: one for GA teachers and one for almost any social studies teacher. The centers consisted of nine different activities that are all listed on the student recording sheet. The recording sheet is completely optional. I like to use it to help students keep track of ..read more

A social studies interactive notebook is a great way to engage students and to help students focus as they organize social studies content and/or take guided notes. One of the great things about this notebook is that you can adapt it to meet the needs of your classroom. There is no one right or wrong way to use these lessons. You can complete it together as a whole group, in small groups, or have students complete this independently. You can read about how I incorporate interactive notebooks into my social studies (and science) instruction here. Organization To keep students organized, I reco ..read more

There are SO MANY fun ways  to make economics lessons engaging and hands-on for students, and it’s a great way to incorporate a little math into instruction. This post shares some of my favorite ways to teach economics to upper elementary students. I begin my economics unit by teaching about goods and services. I have my students use magazines and newspapers to create a collage. They divide a sheet of construction paper in half and label one side with “Goods” and one side with “Services”. Underneath each label, students should glue pictures of examples of goods and services. I love read ..read more

Have you ever had a moment when every single students’ eyes were completely glazed over, and you were pretty sure no one actually heard what you were saying? That was me on Thursday. I was seven days into my government unit, and I thought we were doing pretty good. Students had completed a few interactive notebook entries and a few graphic organizers, and I wanted to quickly review before my students completed a checks and balances worksheet I had made the night before. As I started to review, I could see that the main, maybe even only, focus of my students was that in 30 minutes they would f ..read more

Assessment. Now that’s a loaded word in education circles. The past few years I’ve been in so many meetings about assessment that I feel like just hearing the word makes my head want to spin. I’m certainly not going to try to condense everything into one blog post, so please don’t run away! I was hesitant to make summative assessment a part of the instructional process, but I felt that it was necessary to emphasize that summative assessments (assessments that will be counted toward a student’s grade) should not take place until after the student has experienced multiple learning opportunitie ..read more

At this point in the process, students are ready to show what they know. I often refer to Bloom’s taxonomy as I create these lessons, and I frequently have students analyze and evaluate. However, my favorite method is to allow students to apply what they’ve learned by creating various products. I do have to be very careful to make sure the emphasis of the assignment is the standards that I’m teaching, and not the artistic elements of the product. I definitely want my students to take pride in their work and to give their best effort to the application, but I don’t want to lose focus of the pu ..read more

Somewhere along the way, we’ve been made to feel like teaching facts is wrong, but that’s not the case at all. There is a basic level of information students need to know to be able to perform performance tasks and higher level thinking activities. One of my all time favorite teaching books is Why Don’t Students Like School which was written by a cognitive scientist who specializes in HOW the brain learns. In the book, he confirmed what I’d always suspected, that there was a time and place for teaching, exploration and reviewing basic level information. That being said, I absolutely do not b ..read more

Presenting content has historically been my least favorite component of teaching social studies and science. I feel that I often either overuse or underuse this part of instruction. Before we begin, let’s recap where we are at this point in the series: Organize your curriculum into units and mini units within units. Identify key vocabulary words within each unit. Develop a plan for frontloading or preteaching the vocabulary words. Prepare four different games that can be used to review the key vocabulary words. The day after I teach the vocabulary words, I present the information and conten ..read more

Before we dive in to the nitty gritty of social studies and science instruction, I think it’s important to look at the big picture of developing unit plans. Last summer I wrote about how I map out my unit plans for the year, which you can read about here. If you haven’t read it yet, be sure to check it out, because there a several documents you can download for your long-term planning. Above is a picture of my personal social studies and science pacing guide. I will probably tweak it just a bit for the next school year, but you can get the gist of it. After I create this yearly plan, the nex ..read more