Would notebooking be a good approach for my 13 year old?

[Erin]

Basic background-- We have two kids, DD is in 5th, DS in 7th.

We just re-started HSing DS after Christmas (we HSed his 3rd and 4th grade years following a sub-standard school, but moved just before 5th, so started him in a new district and he was happy. ...Til 7th grade that is. Anyone remember Jr Hi?)

We do Sonlight, Saxon and Holt Science, a secular program, all of which we used in our first HS bout.

 

He's a bright kid, but he has language issues. Spelling is appalling, handwriting is nearly illegible, and he gets more information from things that are read to him rather than that which he has to read to himself. On the bright side, he has a good grasp of grammar and mechanics. I also have a really strong suspicion that he has ADD.

 

 

 

So I'm trying to decide: How do I get this kid turned on to school? :unsure:

 

He knows he does well with Saxon so far as learning information, (in fact that was one of his complaints with public school was the lousy math series and that he didn't have as good of a grasp...) But he "hates math."

He rarely hates science. Even on days when it's nothing but reading and response type of work, he just loves science enough to carry him through.

He's also enough of a history nerd that whatever I throw at him so far as that goes is OK, too. But just OK. He hates to read, so any literature tends to be difficult (we do Audible whenever possible. He's very much an auditory kid). I went with Sonlight in hopes that the real-books aspect would be appealing rather than SO much textbook work. It did wonders in the younger years, anyway...

 

Then I tripped over notebooking and thought ah-hah! A new panacea!

 

Has anyone had luck using a notebooking approach within their curricula with kids like DS, who hates to read and has trouble with writing? The teacher in me says anything a child is struggling with they obviously need to practice more, so it could be a good fit...

 

 

Someone please give me some thoughts... :confused1:

[Erin]

did i put this in the wrong place?

[SailorMom]

Well - first - his issues sound similar to my DS (who is dysgraphic, dyslexic, and dyscalculic).... Has any of that been checked into?

 

Otherwise - was your son the kinda kid who enjoyed the crafty side of elementary school? I think note-booking - even in the older ages, appeals to those kids best.

 

As for notebooking itself - I've actually decided to give this a try next year (10th grade) for my son with all the dys's for those reasons, adding in the use of Livescribe paper (and pen) :) This way it will be a talking notebook, lol.

 

I plan to print diagrams or whatnot on the special paper when it will be useful - so that when he's, say, working on chemistry and looking at his (badly scrawled) notes, he can hit play and hear my lecture exactly at the time he was writing something.

 

He also has heterotopias (little balls of grey matter in the white matter of his frontal lobes) which mess with his executive functions (among other things) and I'm hoping note booking will help him organize better (crossing my fingers).

[Erin]

Thanks for the reply, Kristy. :)

 

He has had a basic LD battery run back in early elem. He had speech delays so it was standard protocol to run other language tests. It all came back low-normal but just watching him grow, it's obvious speech was a reflection of other language problems. (He's actually really good at math. He intuitively picks things up. He just doesn't like doing it.)

 

At 13, he hasn't had speech problems in years, instead, it's now all in his reading/writing.

"Big" words will throw him. He just looks and guesses. When I catch him, I'll have him go back, re-read, break into smaller pieces, use phonics rules, etc. When it's just in silent reading, though, who knows what I'm missing! Like I said, he's a bright kid, so he tends to choose a lot of non-fiction science-y type books that are packed full of "big words."

Reading aloud is difficult too, obviously, as there are multiple language pieces in the brain that now have to be used at the same time...

 

Because his handwriting is so bad, we're really working at keyboarding. I want him to get to where he can type as fast as he thinks. But where note booking also does a lot of hand written work, I'm wondering if this is a good fit. I don't want him to hang up in the writing process though, just because his hand writing is bad, KWIM?

[helena]

Maybe he'd like the Indian Jones history curriculum? http://www.indyintheclassroom.com/index.asp

A friend just showed it to me, so I'm not totally sure how it works. Maybe something like this with a little reading and notebooking pages could work. Here's some my daughter likes to use:

http://jimmiescollage.com/downloads/general/general-notebooking-pages-set.pdf

http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/us_history_printables.htm (scroll down a little)

http://www.homeschoolhelperonline.com/notebooking_history_geography.shtml

 

History notebooking has been a highlight this year! I've seen a definite improvement in handwriting and spelling. Sometimes they're messy, but that's okay, they're packed with good information, neat pictures (some printed, some hand drawn), and they always look good printed on card stock. :)

 

One of my favorite things about notebooking is that she can choose which print up she wants to use. If she doesn't feel like doing a ton of writing she picks a page with less lines. I print a bunch of pages at one time and tell her to use them up before I'll do another batch. Everybody wins because some are more challenging, fun, or easy.

 

 

hth

[SailorMom]

Erin - I do know what you mean :) I let me son type anything he can. He also had a speech delay (another dys - dyspraxia). 5 years of speech therapy! As for his LD battery - if a school did the tests I wouldn't go by their results. When I had my son go through a battery of tests at a neuropsych's office, the results were completely different. Public schools have it in their best interest to NOT have a child place in extra services. As for something that has worked well for us for the 'big' words, have him sight memorize chunks of them. For example, the "ough" sound - have him learn that the same way he'd learn sight words. Really helps when they get to long words they don't recognize. Keep in mind that when he is trying to sound out those long words, he very well could be getting lost in what chunks are where and they may even move around the page to him - very difficult to sound out when then happens, lol. My DS is also very good at math, but has to struggle with his dyscalculia to actually get to do the math, lol. Anyway, there are some great websites out there. I also highly recommend you look into the Livescribe pen for him. You can get a refurbished one for about $70, and we are just loving ours.

[Lily_Grace]

I have a 13yo, and at this point he's a little past the notebooking stage. When he was younger it worked, because the topic was central to that day - he could take notes, write a paragraph, and be done.

 

Now at 13, it's not a viable option. What we have done is come up with notecarding - 4-5 index cards with headers that he then fills in the information on each one. This gives him a place to organize his research (which, at his age, it actually is) and cross reference different sources before putting all of it together for 1 paper to go in his notebook. For example, right now he's learning about slavery in the 1800s. He has one card for abolitionists, 1 card for legal documents related to slavery, 1 for the Underground Railroad, and 1 for former slaves who fought back. They are all part of a bigger project, where he gets to type the finished product.

For smaller bites that he needs to pay attention to, we still use these Story Mapping For History sheets. You might be interested in those. They require little writing but are great additions to a history notebook.

[Erin]

Public schools have it in their best interest to NOT have a child place in extra services.

On the contrary, schools try to get kids qualified for any label they can. They get more funding!

And even if I didn't have to drive about 200 miles to a specialist's office, we really can't afford such a thing anyway... But yep, we do the same thing with word "chunks," too. -tion, for example, just came up in a word today. I can't even remember what the word was, but he blew through it, said some nonsense word and I made him take it apart. "Well it ends in -tion."

Yeah, but you need to look at the pieces of the rest of it, too. lol

 

LilyGrace,

Maybe I'm missing something, but how is writing info on a notecard any different than writing it on paper? Even in younger years, a topic like states of matter, for example, should be more than a single day's topic...