Social Studies/Reading Notebooks

When I started two years ago my team was hoping we would integrate social studies and reading together. In effect, I'd teach a major of reading through the social studies content with some use of our reading textbook (as a supplement). At that time we had just adopted a new set of social studies materials, which conveniently came with a student journal. There were some elements of the journal, and I used them often, but there were quite a few pages I opted not to use for one reason or another.

This year we are going into our second year without the student journal that accompanies the material set. While we still have access to the pages (in pdf form), I've moved to tailoring my journals to the reading instruction I'm doing (the pages are more content based instead). Last year's experiment was largely successful. I would write questions aimed at strategies I was teaching, or at content I hoped kids to uncover. The questions were glued into student journals, and they'd respond below the question strip. This cut down on paper usage, but monitoring journals was a monster pain. Additionally this didn't account for any of the reading work (fiction/non-social studies) we were doing.

As I've been going through Guiding Readers I realized I need to better organize the student journals. The first full page is going to be their table of contents where we'll log each entry. I'll model this with my own journal under the document camera. A sample might look something like:

• 9/19 p. 1 The Hunger Games response


• 9/20 p. 1 Hunger Games response/S.S 1.2-3 Questions


• 9/21 p. 2 Catching Fire response/S.S 1.3 Questions

With each day they will write a minimum of a few sentences about what they are reading. Beyond modelling this at the start of the year, I will also have a few options for students to chose from in writing about their book- summarize what they read, describe a character, analyze a character's actions, etc... Students will have choice over time, but we'll start with more structure and guidance as part of the gradual release process. To help the monitoring process I'll collect journals every week (or every third week since I have 3 groups... that part isn't fleshed out yet) to give feedback. I can look through journals to see what kids are saying, and how they are interpreting text. I might also have the journals as a way for kids to keep a record so that they can create a written response in our online blackboard-esque system at the end of the week (alleviating some of the legwork with journals on my end). This will also start to simulate more dialogue about books. The prospect of having a written dialogue is exciting for me, and one that I want to move in the direction of.

Progress Monitoring

One new wrinkle this year is that I have kids bringing their own notebooks. Last year we had social studies journals that were included with our new curricular materials. We had the option of getting them as consumables, and we were to provide input to our administrator about getting them again. I opted against it, seeing the journals at 2-4 dollars a piece being a massive outlay that was unnecessary.

Why was it unnecessary? While some of the pages were great, I opted to teach social studies as a study in reading. Instead of simply searching for content, questions like "What was the main idea of section 1.3?" end up being more effective. I still use some of the content area questions, but I help the kids less. Instead of "Label the landforms above," which corresponds to the EXACT SAME picture in the book, I ask them to "Name a landform related to land (not to be confused with those by water), and describe what it looks like." Kids then need to do one of two things:
1) examine the non-fiction feature carefully to determine what exactly makes a mountain different than a plain or basin...or
2) read the text carefully to determine what the actual definition is.

Either way kids are asked to do more with the reading they are doing. Combine that with instruction around main and supporting ideas (again, not included in social studies journal/consumable) and you've got a better forum for practicing non-fiction reading.

On Friday we'll actually start a 2+ day exploration into narrative writing by having kids think about the landforms of the US, and use their 4th grade experience with Lewis and Clark to write about how they would travel across the United States (1800's). There is a piece of writing in the social studies text they'll use as well. But it should be fun... a little foray into creative writing while applying content area knowledge.