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Teaching Tips January 1, 2009 |
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This practice is very popular in the Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling. It started with the nature journals that are a key element of that approach, and expanded into century books and museum books. Curriculum designers soon started adding notebooking to their programs to provide a hands-on, interactive activity that works for both tactile-kinesthetic and visual learners. What makes the technique so popular is its flexibility. It can be used with just about any age, learning style, and skill level, and is great when teaching one subject to multiple ages at one time. The particular format of the notebook is also flexible. It can be as simple as a three-ring binder with lined paper. Inexpensive nature journals can be purchased that have a blank area at the top of the page for sketching and a lined portion at the bottom for recording one’s thoughts. Now that scrapbooking has become so popular, there are a variety of materials, tools, and memory books available that often appeal to more artistic students. Under the Charlotte Mason approach, the notebook or journal was not meant to be part of the teaching process or a formal assignment. It was an optional activity that the student did to record what was observed in nature, thoughts, impressions, and ideas to be pursued. The notebook was meant to be for the child, and was not even reviewed for grammar and spelling. The point was to encourage self-expression and purposed thought. Notebooking is particularly popular in history and geography programs as a way to record what has been learned. In this case, the notebook is NOT filled with notes from a teacher’s lecture, but with whatever information catches the student’s attention or the student wants to record to prompt his/her memory. How the material is recorded depends on the student’s learning style. It can be a journal entry, a sketching, a visual representation or graphic organizer, an outline or listing of points to remember, a short story, an essay, a drawing, a poem – whatever helps the student show what was learned. Depending on the purpose of the assignment, the parent may grade it, in which case spelling, correct grammar, and neatness are expected. What is included in the notebook will vary depending on the student’s age and skill level. The same material may be presented by the parent, but then each child can pursue learning and research based on their abilities. The parent can help younger children with their entries, even having the child dictate what is to be written if desired. High school students will obviously include much more material in their notebook, with more structure and variety included. Century books are a way to visualize important events, people, and dates. They are glorified timelines, and typically contain more than just a listing of dates on a graph. Likewise, museum books are a way to display something that represents a topic or time period. For example, a nature history museum book could include drawings of animals or people groups along with a brief paragraph or label explaining the entry. A trip to an aquarium or zoo can be recorded in a similar notebook. KEY WORDS: notebook, Mason, multiple |
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