Is anyone here doing notebooking in high school? How about with boys who aren’t too interested?!? I’m trying to make written narrations a bit more appealing (they’re new to him yet)…and wondering what others are doing in this area. If you’re doing this would you please share?
My kids are not in high school yet, so can’t give you any personal stories from my end. But, I know that Barb from the Handbook of Nature Study blog and the Harmony Fine Arts blog uses/used notebooking with her high school kids. You might be interested in browsing her blog and see the kinds of things she did.
We started notebooking this year. Dd is 11th grade and notebooking for history. She LOVES it!! I purchased the Notebooking Treasury from http://notebookingpages.com/ This is just OK for us. I found we needed many sheets that weren’t available. Also, I find the site extremely cumbersome and unorganized. I ended up mostly creating my own sheets. Our sons are 7 (2nd grade) and 7 months old so I really don’t have notebooking experience with boys. But as mentioned above, Barb at Handbook of Nature Study blog and the Harmony Fine Arts blog uses notebooking with her high school son.
Let me know if you any further specific questions….
I am wondering if you did go ahead and do notebooking with your son(s) in high school. We are finally approaching that this next season (fall 2015). We have used scm and ambleside off and on – as well as notebooking in various forms, unit studies and notgrass america the beautiful for our history spine this past year. We’ve found that copywork and narration did not help very much with grammar and understanding of grammar, even though we’ve read tons of great living books… we still have had to go in and teach grammar and composition. Language Lessons has helped out tremendously with Queenhomeschool dot com; and we thought about moving forward with something more textbookish this next year… but I think we are going to stick with Slow and Steady wins the race. We are moving to LangLessons Grammar Review – and 7sistershomeschooling offers a great little 10 week course in composition basics. Then we are going to continue to impart narration, copywork and now dictation (studied) into our son. If nothing else, he will have in side of him scores of stories, quotes and sayings that will lead and guide him for all of his life…
We are just scared to do textbooks again with him. Every time we have done text books and worksheets and all that dry stuff… we just see his light diminish and it just becomes a chore. He’s not a heavy ready nor would I say he’s voracious … he reads…and he is very picky about what he reads. But any reading even if it is not heavy like some Cm’rs would do is better than a dry lifeless text book. Though I have used textbooks as jumping off points for research and notebooking… (we now blog with him… we call it blogbtoking).
Anyhow, sorry – I am curious… if you found help – or moved forward slowly and did it anyway. If so, love to hear from you or anyone else. Wisdom words are ALWAYS appreciated. We are so scared to move forward for high school this year… what we do now will solidify his future one way or another. Lord please help. 🙂
We might be too simple here but this is what we did/do. We continue the BOC throughout, after beginning in about 4th grade. Same with a common place book, they also begin a spiritual notebook where they take sermon notes and/or notes from Bible studies. Their other notebooks such as their written narrations just continue on the same as in lower grades but they just improve and I have higher expectations. We use Writer’s Inc to guide us for specific writing assignments that I want them to learn in composition.
Then they build notebooks for their individual interests such as homestead/trapping, airplanes, homekeeping, gardening, one even went deep into the medieval era of history because of his great love for it, etc… these are done at a high school level because that’s where they are at. By this time they are basically released to be as free and creative as they can be and/or as detailed as they care to be. These are always done and put together with the understanding that they will be kept for future reference and for sharing with others their love of the particular subject. This sharing could be a younger sibling or a college professor or even in a career aspect some day.
Not sure if this helps or is what is being asked is getting answered but it never hurts to share what we’re doing as it just might inspire someone somewhere 🙂
For us, it has depended on the child. My oldest “notebooks” our nature studies, biology, keeps an art journal (he is taking Art this year as a subject for credits) and has a BOC. That’s it for him. Everything else is in composition books or binders as needed. He is not interested in any cute printed paper and would usually tell me that it is a waste of ink. It doesn’t help him learn more or make it interesting.
Now, my next son loves all of it. Notebooking if it’s available, drawing history lessons, nature study, etc. So I imagine for high school he will be more interested in some sort of notebooking beyond the composition books. But that remains to be seen.
Thank you–that was very helpful and informative. It’s always a treasure and gift to share what we have found to work with others. Not everything works in every family – but without the sharing of information, how would we know if could work? Thank you to my3boys as well for your response.
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