Beginning of Clutter Free Classroom Week 3

This week is about starting to purge in your classroom. I'm so excited!! I can't wait to jump in! However, she encourages you to take it section by section and not trying to tackle too much at once. She even made a cool checklist for us to separate out each little section to help keep things organized. Of course, this feeds into my love of checklists. I always feel so much better when I have a checklist. I feel like I accomplish so much more!
I'll need to remember to take pictures as I go this week and post them on Friday for the linky party!

I've been working really hard this track out on creating things to use during my literacy time this quarter. I've also been working on social studies. Our social studies curriculum is really vague, and social studies is one of my favorite things to teach, so I'm bummed it's so vague. However, I've worked throughout the years on creating curriculum for each quarter. This quarter, we're going to be learning about the role North Carolina played during the Civil War, along with Native Americans of North Carolina.
To teach my kids about the Native Americans, I broke the tribes up into the 6 main tribes of the state. I then made 3 basic PowerPoint presentations to give my kids for them to take basic notes. They get a blank map of North Carolina and fill it in with tribe information as we go along. I have the presentations, but am unable to attach PowerPoint presentations. If you'd like them, just let me know and I'll email them to you. The other thing I'm going to do for Native Americans today is a project I developed, entitled Native Americans of North Carolina. This could be adopted to your state's tribes if you like. I love having at least one take-home project per quarter, and this is the first time I'm going to try this one. One of my coworkers did this project last quarter, and the products I saw were great!
To teach my kids about North Carolina in the Civil War, I read a book called North Carolina as a Civil War Battleground. It was a little dry (it is a history book), but I love history books, so it wasn't bad for me. I've then taken all of the information from that book and am putting it into Prezis to use for my kids. If you're not familiar with Prezi, go ahead and try it...it's very easy to learn and fun to use. It's a more "exciting" presentation form than PowerPoint. I can't attach it here, but I believe you should be able to find it if you search for "Preparations for War" or "North Carolina Leaves the Union." I haven't finished the rest yet. I'll be sure to post the name of those presentations as I finish them.