A School Year Kept

As a look back on our school year, I want to share a bit of our formal keeping from this past year.

My Year 5 students kept three special notebooks in addition to their nature journals (which I share photos of every so often anyway and won't include here): their History Notebook, their Science Notebook, and their Prose and Poetry Notebook.

In my post on our School Plans for this year, I detailed the way we would be using these books -- frequency, purpose, format, and so on.  (Here are my write-ups for Year 5 and Form I.)  So I'll share a short description here, but for more information, head over there.  And then if you have further questions, ask away!

From my Year 5 Students

Their history notebooks contain their written narrations for the year in that subject (both for This Country of Ours and their historical biography in Term 3), as well as mapwork, lists, charts, and other keeping they chose to do.

The first half of the photos belong to Vincent and the second to Gianna.  As you can see, they have very different styles and their individual strengths and interests shine through in their notebooks, which is why Charlotte Mason-style notebooking is different than other more cookie-cutter, static forms.

(By the way, the pictures below feature the EcoQua notebooks I bought for our Year 5 keeping. We love them and will definitely be using them in the future.)

Their science notebooks were simpler, holding only their weekly written narration for that subject:

Their Prose and Poetry Notebooks, which are basically a precursor to a commonplace book, are below. They wrote in this notebook in lieu of copywork for ten minutes weekly.  They were able to choose their selection.  Interestingly, both chose to include large amounts of Hiawatha, which we read in Term 2.  But the rest was a mish-mash of poetry, famous speeches, bits from Kim and Shakespeare, and more.

All three of these notebooks will continue into next year.  The History Notebook will be used in Term 1 before we move into a proper Book of Centuries with the new history rotation in Term 2.  Their Science and Prose and Poetry Notebooks are about half-full and will continue to hold their work for those subjects.

From my Form I students

Cate in Year 2 and Xavier in Year 1 had simple keeping on their weekly schedule: an entry in their binder timeline and on their current map.

They also had the option of making animal cards to go along with the Burgess Animal Book, which they opted to do just about every week, and that they did independently.  At the end of the year, we made those into a little book for each of them.

And from me!

I kept a few things alongside my Year 5 kids this year: a world map, a United States map, and a century chart. These were very educative to work on -- and also quite fun!

I also always keep one commonplace book dedicated to school readings, and Year 5 featured very prominently in that this year -- Halliburton, Kipling, Dickens, Helen Keller, John Muir...

In addition to these examples above and to our individual nature journals, we keep two collections as a family: a Calendar of Firsts and a Family Poetry Notebook.  They are both housed in the same binder.

We began keeping our Calendar of Firsts back in 2013, so this is our fourth year of data!

And our poetry notebook are all of the poems each child has learned, illustrated and added to the pile.  We began that when Gianna and Vincent were in kindergarten and have dozens and dozens of poems included now.

That is a look at our year on paper!