handbook of nature study hard copy - January nature journal

I've had the Comstock book on my kindle for years, but never imagined what a hard copy of the text would mean to me. Barb McCoy challenged me personally, well-not really b/c I've never met the woman in my life, to try a nature journal this year.  So, even though it was in the negative cold category the week the Gs did these drawings, we enjoyed practicing a skill we'd tried a couple times before with our painted leaf friends from the previous post.  These are their winter blind contour sketches of the fading crabapple with no leaves.

Our Iliad and Odyssey Visit Goes along with Star Wars Viewing

These images are of the version of the books we read and are copied from the marketing site called Amazon.com where we buy many books both for our shelves and for the Kindle.  Your kids can read these books too.

Black Ships Before Troy  and The Wanderings of Odysseus by Rosemary Sutcliff are written for the 9 to 12 year old kids in my house. The boys certainly appreciated the bloody battles in the first story as well as the art renditions.  My daughter was always asking why Odysseus did the stupid things he did in the second book.  Discernment runs deep in we women of the household.  The boys were the first to say, "Pride!"  As if that made any of the choices Odysseus made correct, except that he did lead his people well during the Trojan War, and finally got back to Ithaca after learning much about leadership.

For a notebook page to be inserted into the Story of the World curriculum chapter 20, these three pre-adolescent kids answered questions about how Odysseus was similar to characters from the movie series called Star Wars.  These answers flowed freely as each child typed complete sentences that were later printed onto the color we've assigned to "The Arts and Great Books" category as directed in The Well Trained Mind.  When asked how Anakin was similar to Odysseus, all three gave answers relating to creative problem solving, head-strong actions and bull-headed decisions of both characters.

So, in the end, we used notebooking to record organized answers to literature content of what we read, AND we practiced typing with correct fingering to produce the page.  In another lifetime, these questions may have been answered only about the classic Homer tales in worksheet form and by hand.  Sadly, the worksheets would then have not been organized into a binder. A binder which will be used a third time (we created the first pass through of SOTW in kindergarten and first grade) when we are in high school.  We also demonstrated how serious we are about Star Wars movies. 

More planning for next year...

According to Lilliput Station at http://www.squidoo.com/notebooking:
"Notebooking" is a term used to describe the process of creating a written and illustrated record of learning. Unlike other methods of education which are based on consumable workbooks and texts. Notebooking produces a journal of past educational adventures, which can be added to whenever additional learning takes place. Notebooks are a great way to review information and are an excellent way to share your learning experience with others. You can make your notebook from any kind of paper and use any kind of notebook to keep it in- a spiral bound notepad, a three ring binder, a scrapbook. You can even bind your pages into a book or do them on the computer. You can make your pages from scratch or start with premade templates. The possibilities are endless.
Contents at a Glance
1. Things To Put In A Notebook
2. Subjects You Can Notebook
4. What Does Notebooking Look Like?
5. Ways To Bind Notebook Pages
6. Educational Scrapbooking more...
from Lilliput Station at http://www.squidoo.com/notebooking