Learning from the Past The card catalog has been replaced by computers. There was a day when you could walk up to a cabinet filled with actual drawers holding small cards in alphabetical order. The cards were created as a trilogy, where the information listed was rearranged according to the categories of Author, Subject, and Title. When looking up a certain book you could physically walk up to a drawer, open it, and flip back through the cards until the exact book was identified. From that point, you would hand write the information necessary to help you locate the book on the library’s shelves. Antiquated, I know, but relevant as we look to homeschooling our children. We cannot allow our minds to be trapped back in the era of the card catalog, for that is certainly completely irrelevant to our children. If our kids actually walk into a library, they will walk up to a computer to complete their search. With a few swift key strokes, they will have the appropriate information right before their eyes. While we can appreciate how far we have come, our kids are miles ahead of us. They are born into this technology driven world. They think its normal to watch a television show and watch a person pop up in the corner and tell them some fact about he character that is performing the show, the actor, or the location. They are not annoyed by the “pop up’s” on the computer screen as they search for information; in fact they absorb 12 times the information in one 15 minute sitting that we ever could. (I made up the 12 times, but you know what I mean) Our card catalog mind wants to physically touch, smell, and see our one piece of information. Their computer savvy mind wants to scan through the 3.2 million search engine results, filter for the top 4 relevant sites, and laugh at the funny pop-up. They are being programmed to soak up information like a sponge. So how is this relevant to homeschooling. Besides the obvious “we shouldn’t try to teach them about how to find a book through a card catalog” we should embrace this information driven world while teaching our kids to focus. The challenge with a our new world is that our kids can quickly acclimate to this alternate universe. They can believe that its OK to buy a movie ticket while texting their friends simultaneously, or sit at the dinner table and be watching a YouTube video and chatting as they eat and communicate with the people sitting at the same table. As homeschoolers in the new millennium we must learn from the past. We need to teach our kids to categorize their technology-filled world into a few essentially vital categories: people relationships knowledge entertainment If our kids can recognize that everything fits into one of those categories, then they can be taught to prioritize them. People first, knowledge, entertainment, and so on. While we cannot change the world to look like it did when we stood in a library at age 12, we can teach our kids to treat this new world with the proper perspective. We need to teach our kids to focus on people and relationships (not the touchy-feely kind, but the “you are more important than this cell phone” kind) and embrace the benefits that technology provides. Our kids are sponges. We need to teach them to absorb knowledge and to seek hard after those subjects, topics, and fields that they are passionate about. We need to not be intimidated that they can do 12 times more than we could do in the same amount of time, but rather train them to use that ability to become a better student, family member, and human being. Preview of the Heart of Homeschooling God’s Way Master Class. We need to STOP measuring success by grades, achievements, awards, and worksheets.
Explore, Discover, & Create . . . with Notebooking! At the end of each school year, are you finding yourself swimming through mounds of worksheets, quizzes, tests, and half-finished workbooks wondering just what to do with it all? Where does the organization begin? What do you keep? Where will you keep it? How much should you, dare I say, throw away? As you begin to tackle this heap, your brain recalls the many hours that went into creating this voluminous collection. You may start to wonder just how well spent those hours really were. You remember the great ambitions with which you started the school year and the many good intentions that fell to the wayside in order to finish this massive collection you are now faced with sorting. Finally, you conclude that if most, or perhaps all, of your children’s work is going to get tucked away somewhere never to be seen again, how much value can it possibly hold? Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it doesn’t have to anymore! Our family has been introduced to an ageless tool of learning that keeps us from creating these questionable mounds of paper throughout the year. There is nothing left to sort. There is nothing left to pack away. There is nothing to throw away. Instead, another volume (or two or three or more) of our children’s prized work gets added to their personal library at the end of each year. No more busywork. No more second-guessing if our time has been well spent. As a matter of fact, this tool has freed me from the seemingly never-ending search for the perfect curriculum! It can literally transform the way you approach your children’s education and set afire a love of learning within each child. Spend your precious hours exploring, discovering, and capturing the knowledge that awaits you and your children each day. Make learning a journey instead of a list to be checked off at the end of the day and a pile to be sorted at the end of the year. How do you do this? Let me introduce you to the tool that has breathed new life into our homeschooling. It’s called . . . notebooking! Notebooking is the coined term for what one may refer to as educational journaling or scrapbooking. Essentially, the idea is to take your planned school subjects and activities as well as the areas of your child’s interests and create notebooks, compilations of created pages collected in binders. Your child will fill his notebooks throughout the year with what he has learned about these topics. Written narrations, drawings, maps, and photographs are just a few of the items he may include. The pages of his notebooks will capture both the new knowledge he has discovered as well as his own personal reflections of what he has learned. Through the process of creating a notebook, you will likely watch him become a storyteller, a teacher, and most undoubtedly, an expert in some of the topics he studies. Unlike some of the more traditional tools of learning, like worksheets and tests, notebooking allows your child to develop a deeper relationship with what he is learning. Instead of finding out what he doesn’t know about a topic or study, which is what a worksheet or test usually reveals, he is given an opportunity to express everything he does know. By cutting out the busywork that is involved in some of these more traditional methods, you open a window of time and opportunity for your children to dig deeper into topics, to really get to know the people, the places, the events, the concepts, the ideas, and so on of what they are studying. Then, they take this information, digest it, and produce a notebook that tells all about what they have learned. After following this process, there will not be that sudden “unlearning” phenomena that usually takes place after the traditional chapter or unit test. The knowledge that your child gains during his notebooking experience will stick! Most importantly this process fuels a love of learning as your child begins to discover how exciting and fun it is to learn with notebooking! As your children become more experienced with notebooking, you will begin to see the evident benefits of this great tool. The richness of what they are learning will be apparent as their notebooks become filled to the brim with stories, pictures, maps, quotes, and photographs of the people, places, and events encountered. The depth of what they are learning will be told as new layers are added each year to certain notebooks, such as their language arts and math notebooks. The process of learning they have experienced will be unveiled as you note the ways they organize and choose the material they include for their notebooks. You will begin to see certain notebooks take on your children’s personalities as they learn to express themselves in the variety of ways they have been gifted. It is an amazing joy to sit down with your child while they lovingly and passionately share all that they have learned through the process of creating their notebook. Their hearts and hard work have been poured into this notebook and they beam with confidence at the turn of each page. Each year, as you take time to look back through the increasing volumes of notebooks being added to the shelves, you will see that notebooking has become an amazing “living” record of your children’s journey of learning. Instead of tossing the year’s work into a box in the back of the closet, you’ll be looking for ways to add more bookshelves to house these treasures! So how do you begin notebooking with your family? Start simple. Start with one topic or one study for each child or for the whole family. Perhaps the easiest way to start is to let each child begin a notebook of one of their favorite hobbies or passions. Do you have a child that loves dinosaurs? I do! My youngest son would find spare moments throughout the day to notebook his knowledge of dinosaurs. His head would be stuck in any number of books from the library trying to gather information. That’s where it began for him! Today, he is our leading expert when it comes to dinosaurs. Perhaps the easiest place to start notebooking with the entire family is with any history or science topic because there are so many ways to dig into these subjects. You could start very simply by asking your children to give a short narration of what was read on a particular day either during your read-aloud time or their independent reading time. If they give you a blank stare, ask them what they found to be most important or interesting about what was studied and encourage them to write about that. If you have younger children, you may need to write down their narrations for them until they are more proficient with the physical skill of writing. For children who are accustomed to giving short fill-in-the-blank type answers to questions, narration will take some practice to develop. I highly suggest researching the topic of narration for more help in this area. Narration is an invaluable skill that will prove most beneficial in their notebooking studies. As your family or child continues to dig deeper, add new material to the notebook. The notebook may include any number of pages and collections including, but definitely not limited to: written narrations from material studied in books they have read or real life experiences collections of quotes from philosophers, experts, missionaries, statesman, etc. photographs, ticket stubs, and information from field trips maps of places and events studied timelines drawings from your child’s imagination that express his ideas about the particular topic sketches of objects, animals, famous art, or places being studied collections of items such as leaves, pressed flowers, and seeds for a study like botany pictures from hands-on activities or experiments completed during the study nature photos, sketches, and journaled thoughts your child’s handwritten copies of favorite scripture, poetry or selections from favorite literature Ready to get started? (Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com)