Notebooking

Notebooking has been a tool we use often at Creekview Family Learning and one that I have truly come to love. Not only is it a great way to work on writing skills in a meaningful way, but it also serves as a beautiful portfolio for how students make progress through the year. At the end of the year, they have a wonderful notebook to commemorate their year and show off to their family and friends.

Science Notebook

Each week we complete one page in our science notebook to highlight what stood out to us most in that week's lessons. Notebooks are easy to differentiate for different ages and skill levels. All ages can draw pictures to show what they have learned. Alternatively, you can find and print pictures online, or you can take pictures of your science activities during the week and print and glue those in the notebook. I like to use just a regular notebook with wide-ruled paper because we do lots of labeling of diagrams and using more drawings than in other types of notebooks.

To start the year, I printed out a prompt to help guide. This is a great strategy for beginners to notebooking and for young learners.

In addition to printing sentence starters, you can help your beginners by doing most of the writing for them. Here you can see the learner wrote the word "gas" and then I wrote the rest of the entry as he spoke it to me.

As we got farther into notebooking, this learner starters to be responsible for writing his title and we no longer used the printed labels and sentence starters.

As we moved further into the year, you can see that this learner started to pick more of his own topics and relied less on the topics that I chose to write about.

This 1st grader is using a combination of asking how to spell words and his own sound spelling. This is a great step in his development as a writer.

This 1st grader is starting to take on more responsibility for his notebooking and is now expected to write the first 5 words of his entry. This is a great time to work on that capital letter to start each sentence.

Instead of drawing pictures, you can also print out pictures of science activities you have done, and the student can glue them in. We tracked the growth of our bean plant from seed to plant, and it was such a great way to really see the changes throughout the process.

Bible Notebook

Bible notebook is a tradition we began last year and have continued on with this year. For Bible notebook I actually print lined pages that are a little larger than wide-ruled paper. Having more space and that midline helps new writers as they are still developing their letter formation.

This is a 1st grader's notebook. He was responsible for writing the title of the story and the date from the start of the notebook.

You can be as creative as you would like to be with the illustrations. We had some fun animal stickers that we decided to use for this entry.

A couple months into the notebook, this 1st grade learner started to be responsible for writing the first few words in his entry. The rest was narrated and scribed. This entry provided an opportunity to talk about quotation marks.

For each entry, he became responsible for one more word until he reached the number of words the started to feel challenging.

As young students take on more responsibility for the writing in their entries, you can begin to work on skills like capitalization and end punctuation.

In this entry, the learner wrote some, then I wrote some, then he wrote some more.

Using this turn-taking method can help a young writer who is working on writing stamina and/or perseverance.

One of the things I love most about notebooking is that it grows with your learner. Whether you have a reluctant writer, an emerging reader, or an advanced learner, notebooking can be adapted to meet them where they are while still creating a meaningful record of learning.

Best of all, notebooking doesn't have to be complicated! Start with a notebook, some colored pencils, and a willingness to let your children show what they know. You may be surprised by how much learning unfolds on those pages over the course of a year.

Do you have questions about notebooking, curriculum choices, or teaching multiple ages? That's exactly the kind of support I provide through homeschool coaching. Feel free to reach out—I'd love to help you create a homeschool experience that works for your family.