Hello everyone :-) I am very new to the concept of notebooking, and I seriously need some help! Bear with me, I overthink things when looking at new ideas... and as I'm sure you all know, homeschooling in general can be overwhelming to plan. :-)
Anyway...
I am SO confused about planning my eclectic homeschooling w/ notebooking. I enjoyed CM the most as far as methods, but I want to do things our own way. I've tried over and over, restarting again and again with different curriculum choices, and I really feel I need a mix.
I think notebooking would be the ABSOLUTE answer for us as far as tying it all together if we work it into things we enjoy, but I am so overwhelmed. I have lots of things I'm looking at. I have *no* idea how to divide everything, or how to motivate & inspire my children to notebook things.
Should I have a notebook, too? Has anyone done that?
Do I plan what we'll notebook, and set pages out for them? Does anyone let their child choose what to notebook about, or do you direct it?
Anyway, here's an idea of things the kids and I enjoy for school activities... I would like to implement these into my re-visioning for our family & I am not sure where we should notebook...
- Unit Studies
- Nature Walks / Study
- Copywork
- Art (painting, reproducing famous artwork)
- Listening to Classical music
- Reading 'living books'
- Lots of free reading
- Hands-On activities & experiments
- Math Mammoth (so far)
- Maybe some workbooks for their age level (activity books, essentially)
I want to implement notebooking mostly with nature study I think, and bits here and there with readings that we do about history/geography, and noting things we learn in unit studies. Maybe it would be good for my kids to notebook about things they learn as part of a unit study, and maybe write about a 'living' book we finish...? Not sure, there might be too much going on with all of those subjects / ideas.
I mostly had an idea to do notebooking from things we learn while watching Crocodile Hunter / Wild Kingdom. We could also notebook about general nature around us - our garden, weather, birds at our feeder, our cats, etc. We are planning a zoo membership so we can go one a month or every other month, and I think that would be neat to study as well.
I ALSO had an idea to let the kids do a journal page each day about whatever they like. They can draw, write, etc. and I wouldn't correct their work. (this could probably be added in with their notebooking pages)
I think I might be more excited than my kids, lol. (Can you tell??) I would like to have everything notebooked but I think that's a bad idea. I have NO idea how to plan any of this. I am WORRIED that I will over-do it with pretty much everything. I already feel that I am overdoing it in brainstorming it all. I don't want to burn my kids out with notebooking. I don't want to try to pile on lots of things we have to do each day. I would like for homeschooling to feel like a natural part of our lives, not a lot of 'work' that the kids have to finish before they can play.
I feel guilty about a lot of the supplies we have that we might not use - (and I am not sure how we would use them at this point) Classical Art books, year 1 books from Ambleside Online's curriculum... I am not sure if / how I could use these.
) You can see the pages in my album. Yesterday we did our Memorial Day pages because the kids asked! I was so excited because like you I just want to notebook everything. They love looking through all the pages and choosing which one to use. Later this week we'll be doing a Christopher Columbus page. My first goal is to work up to notebooking - one page each day for both History and Science. Right now our scripture memory isn't on a schedule. We move to a new verse as we learn them so we'll add a verse copywork page in as necessary. Further down the road I envision artists and composers too! I printed a bunch of the basic pages and put them in a file folder wall organizer so they are available for spontaneous notebooking!
