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| Source: rewireme.com |
It is hard for me to believe that we are embarking on our sixth year of homeschooling this fall! I clearly remember that first year of trying to find our own way when I was just homeschooling our first grade daughter. I look back and realize how many delightful things we "stumbled" upon at the beginning of our homeschooling journey. I use quotes because I know God was soooo faithful to guide and direct us, and I marvel how it all came together beautifully (even though I had NO idea what I was doing...or getting myself into long-term...Haha!).
One of those wonderful things we did that very first year was the art of notebooking.
Now, I didn't even know that this was a "thing" or that it had a special name, but it was very natural for us, looking back.
My daughter was already used to writing words and sentences in a composition book for spelling and writing in kindergarten. When we brought her home the following year to begin homeschooling, we carried over the practice of writing in notebooks for the language arts, but also ended up choosing a science curriculum that incorporated notebooking. For history, we chose to check out books at the library based upon her interests, read them aloud together, and then she would journal what she learned using words and pictures.
(Note: This notebooking practice is actually called "written narration" and is usually expected of older elementary students. For younger kids, oral narration works just as well for the student to "own" the material they read about and truly learn it well.)
The following are some written narration samples from my daughter's first grade year (as always, feel free to click on the pictures to see them enlarged and in more detail). One thing I've learned about notebooking over the years is that it is very personal. A notebook from a prolific writer and reader (like my daughter) looks very different from a more concise, technically-minded student (like my son), and that is A-OKAY! The point of notebooking is not the pretty pictures, accurate spelling, grammar, etc, and they ought not be compared, even for the same grade level. The point is that the student can reflect upon, process, and tell back what they have learned. In this way, it becomes firmly cemented in their mind and experience.
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| Written narration about the Trojan Horse |
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| Written narration about Pompeii |
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| Written narration about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad |
Now, like I mentioned earlier, written narrations usually follow after years of oral narrations. My rising second-grade daughter does a lot of oral narrations to me about the audio books she is currently listening to. This comes very naturally to her since she knows that I am not reading these books with her, so she feels like she can fill me in on the story. (She tends to be much tighter-lipped about narrating things I already know about, like a read aloud we do together, because she claims I should already know all about it! Yes...she is a sassy one.) I am trusting that she will grow into written notebooking in the years ahead. Everyone works at their own pace, and that is to be appreciated and respected.
I do want to mention that notebooks need not be blank, if that is too intimidating for you or your child. As I mentioned above, we use a lot of notebooks for science. Apologia puts out wonderful science notebooks that provide lots of guidance using narrative prompts, journaling boxes, diagrams to label, and pictures to color, if that is helpful for you.
Here are a few samples of the kids' science notebooks. As you can see, I have children who are verbose and love to draw and color, and others who much prefer to keep things short and simple (or to just keep it oral, and not even put pencil to paper, like my youngest!). If your child doesn't like drawing, pasting in pictures works well, too (see the sea turtle page below). Quite often, my 4th grade son enjoys making comic strips and explaining them to me, too. It all "counts" and it all displays learning on an internal level.
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| Grade 1 science notebook (daughter) |
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| Sea turtle page using printed online pictures |
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| Grade K science notebook about the heat and volcanoes on Venus (son) |
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| Grade 4 science notebook, comic strip about the immune system (son) |
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| Cell diagram, Grade 5 (daughter) |
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| Grade 5 digestive system notebook page (daughter) |
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| zoom in of digestive diagram from entry above |
I've already blogged extensively about how we use notebooks in our nature studies. If you'd like to learn more about that, I'd encourage you to check out this post and this one here. Nature journaling is a wonderful practice to start with if you are new to notebooking, even for yourself. As with all things, your kids will learn and appreciate the art of notebooking best if they see YOU do it and get excited about it, too! While I've always kept a personal journal, and sometimes a prayer journal, I have enjoyed adding various notebooks to my life in the past few years, such as a nature journal, history journal (Book of Centuries...more on that in a future post!), reading journal, etc. It truly is a natural way to learn...at ANY age and stage!
If you'd like to learn more about notebooking and the practice of narration (both written and oral), I'd encourage you to check out the following resources that have been a wonderful help and inspiration to me:
The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason by Laurie Bestvater
Know and Tell: The Art of Narration by Karen Glass
I hope that notebooks serve you and your children well on your life journeys, dear friend! It truly is a transformative way to create, build, and strengthen your relationship with knowledge...and with each other!
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