Talk to me about notebooking

[oneangelwaiting]

4/5 of my kids at home are sick with colds and the library doesn't have the science books I reserved yet, so I was at a bit of a loss on science for the day. So I printed off some free notebooking pages from some website, gave my boys a stack of books to choose from, and told them to read a chapter and copy or write 3 sentences and draw some pictures.

 

They had so much fun! My first grader was reading a sentence then shouting "mommy! Did you know that horse power. ..." etc.

 

So here is my question. I have a feeling the answers will be "do whatever you want!" but I'm wondering what works for your family.

 

Do you have them correct spelling, punctuation and grammar errors? I attached the work they did today. I imagine going forward we'll want to use library books, do you let your kids pick subjects or give them a topic so that everyone is kind of on the same page? Or do you choose the books/subjects for them? Is there anything else you use notebooking pages for, such as selecting spelling words or anything like that?

 

We've been doing space for science but I don't think they are that into it. I feel we've covered the important things like the relationship of the earth and sun, day and night, planets, the moon, etc. so I don't feel too badly about moving on for the next few months.

 

Also does anyone use those notebooks from Dyslexia Games or do you just print off your own similar to what I did? I think they look so fun but?

[Tortfeasee]

There are probably as many ways to do note booking as there are ways to homeschool.  I can only tell you what we do.  We started MP Christian Studies I this year and it wasn't a good fit for us, so we switched to pages from notebookingpages.com.  I read a Bible story while DD8 draws a picture to illustrate it, and then she narrates the story and I scribe for her.  I don't want her to limit her narration to reduce the handwriting burden.  Since I am doing the writing spelling and grammar aren't problems for now.  Eventually she will do her own writing, but even then I probably won't ask for corrections.  She is still working on creating good summaries, and I don't want to take the focus off of that for now.  I think it is working really well and her retention is fantastic with this method.  I'm thinking using it with more subjects in the fall.

[ALB]

We now notebook pretty extensively.  I did a blog post about how we do it here.  We use composition notebooks and my kids either draw a picture or diagram, or I print an image from online.  I try to give some parameters for what they include, and write out names of people and places on the white board to help with spelling and also for triggering ideas of things to write about.  I do check their grammar and spelling, but am not overly picky if its a concept we haven't covered very much yet.  

My kids enjoy making their pages, but they enjoy looking back over them even more.  They love to pull out their notebooks to show relatives their work, and I love how that results in frequent review of material we've learned!  They are proud of their work.