Back to School 2012-2013 Bulletin Boards Tour # 2

I have two more bulletin boards to share with you today...my content area bulletin boards for Social Studies and Science. This summer, I worked on a social studies board that would allow us to represent the time periods in United States History that we study as well as the themes of social studies. Here's what I came up with:

There are many reasons why I love this board, and as I kick off the school year, I'm finding more things to love about it! I have really been reflecting on social studies and trying to figure out what pulls it all together--I think my timeline notebooks and this bulletin board are going to streamline my social studies instruction, make it MEATY-er, and spiral many of the themes in history throughout the year so that my students (young as they are) can start to understand the big ideas and themes that keep popping up in history. 

Later this week, I'm going to tell you about my social studies workshop.  One component of social studies workshop is a 5-7 minute minilesson. I love this board because our minilesson can focus on an aspect that we aren't going to study in too much detail, but I can talk about it enough that we can summarize it on our board and make connections with what we have learned so far. Basically, it can allow me to elicit students ideas and create knowledge about the strands in social studies even if we don't have a ton of time to spend on that aspect. I also love that this board will allow us to make connections between time periods. For example, when we study the Civil War, we can go back to Colonization and the American Revolution to examine how the economies of the Northern and Southern colonies differed and how the fear that the constitution would not be ratified planted the long-term seeds of slavery. 

Another component of social studies workshop is a debrief or reflection. Many of our debriefs will focus on composing a paragraph that summarizes the knowledge we have gained about the different aspects of social studies, for example, the geography of the colonies. We can then post our summary on the bulletin board. 

In very similar fashion, I created the following bulletin board for science. I had to use two of my small bulletin boards to display our science curriculum for the year. Here we will post our key learning from the unit. These are the big ideas that I need students to master and walk away with. I also had in mind to add a section for each goal for key vocabulary, but I didn't have enough space on the board, so I am posting our science vocabulary in another area of the room.

If you would like to download the social studies bulletin board materials, it's a freebie on TPT. 
If you are a 5th grade NC teacher and would like the science bulletin board materials, I have put it in google docs for you. 

Have you made functional bulletin boards for your classroom? What I love about these is anyone (student, teacher, principal, parents) can walk into the room and see what we are going to be learning by looking around.

Social Studies workshop....coming up!