Regentrude, how do you teach your kids to take notes?

[birchbark]

I was fascinated by your post here. Note-taking is something we've not covered yet.

[regentrude]

Not sure what exactly you are asking - I wrote everything we do in the post you linked.

[Brenda in MA]

I've started teaching my children outlining/note-taking towards the end of middle school/early high school. What I've done is basically to sit with them for the first few sessions and either actively direct them what to write down, or have my own paper and show them what would make good notes. Then, I review the notes that they take on their own later to make sure they have the hang of it. I agree with Regentrude that the notes should capture the most important details, and that they should be a good study-aid for review and preparing for exams.

 

One thing I've done with History of the US (which we used in 8th/9th grades) is to teach my children note-taking, and then let them use their notes, but not the book, when they take the multiple-choice quizzes that you can buy to accompany that series. Now, I'm not a huge fan of multiple choice quizzes or open-note tests (for history, especially), but one of my main goals for this course for the kids was to help them to learn to take good notes (and learn some history along the way, which they did).

 

It only took them a few months of note-taking and weekly quiz-taking to figure out which things in the chapters are important and might be on the quiz. I think this process has worked for them, as later into high school, both of them have had courses either on-line or at the CC that required note taking to capture important details, and they both have come home with pretty good notes.

 

Brenda

[FaithManor]

We do outlining in 6th and7ht grade and in 8th, I start using Great Courses lecutres as our "college classroom". The first to lectures, I take notes and make liberal use of the remote control to stop the lecture and say "This is a main point, you need to start another aroman numeral on your outline" or "this is a list of facts about xyz that you are really going to need in the future" or whatever.

 

I let them look over my notes to see what they missed. I create my own exams and my expectations are pretty high so they learn to take good notes.

 

It is not something that is taught in our local PS and the students really suffer when they enter college or trade school.