Pre-Reading Notebooks as Mother Culture
Homeschool preparations as a restful practice
Homeschool planning season is in full swing now. I can hear the collective clicking of keyboards and turning of pages in preparation for the new school year. We are all full of hopes for the year ahead. Each book we pre-read, each small plan we get in order helps to make the path ahead more restful and gently worn.
I’ve taken on a new practice this summer that has given my homeschool preparations an extra level of engagement and excitement. I’m pre-reading a one or two books deeply and I’m using a notebook to draw pictures from my reading each week to help be gain more sympathy with my students for the coming school year.
This entry was inspired by my reading from This Country of Ours by H.E. Marshall. We will be studying the colonial era this coming year.
After our exams this past school year, I found a common thread throughout all of my children’s notebook work. Everyone seemed rushed and bothered by the practice instead of restfully enjoying the work of using the notebooks to engage with ideas in more meaningful ways. I have seen this pattern for a while but haven’t known what I could do to help turn the ship toward more joyful and restful learning from my scholars.
After listening to an old episode of the Schole Sisters podcast with Celeste Cruz, I knew I’d found a solution that would help ME slow down with the hopes that I would then have greater sympathy with my children to be equipped to help THEM slow down. The solution? Grab a notebook and use my pre-reading as a creative outlet whilst preparing me in a deeper way for the school year ahead.
For the past month, I’ve been working through some of my pre-reading for the coming school year and I’ve seen so many benefits from the practice that I just had to share with you here.
Some benefits I’ve seen from keeping my narration and more artistic notebooks:
Slowing down and letting the ideas work
One tendency I have is to rush and find ways to be as efficient as possible. The problem is that being efficient is not always effective. And the reason for this is that as a design feature, God created us to be relational beings. This is why Mason talks so much about the Science of Relations. We love to connect with other people and we like to connect with ideas. Doing this takes time, like a seed that gets planted in the soil needs time with the water, dirt and sun to sprout, so ideas need time to germinate in order to take root in our hearts. Rushing through our work in order to get through a book won’t allow the book to get into a person (mother or child). Keeping a notebook is helping me slow down and let the ideas sink more deeply in so that it becomes knowledge.
Below I’ve included a picture of my narration notebook. This is the notebook I keep with me as I’ve been reading through This Country of Ours. I’m keeping rather detailed notes, which I haven’t done before. I’m only reading this book this thoroughly because of my lack of connection and engagement I mentioned earlier. I want to understand the process my students will be going through and I can’t do it with all of their books, but I felt like I could do it with this one for about a month this summer.
As I was reading, I found that I wanted a place in my notebook to write the names, places, and new words that came up in the chapter. So, I came up with this little column system with my narration below it. It’s been extremely helpful to have this little key because I used the names for my timeline or as a quick reference for when names show up again in later chapters. I use the places to decide what I want to add to my map. I don’t include every location on the map, but I do refer to it and enjoy seeing them listed out in an orderly way. The words, I’d like to look up later, but as of now have only noted how many words I either don’t know or would like to go over with my students.
Engaging personally with the material
Another benefit I’m finding from taking more time to keep notebooks from my pre-reading is that I’m seeing how these ideas slowly work their way into my heart and mind. I am literally meditating on the stories and wanting to get answers to questions that come up from the moral failings or encouraging tales I read about in This Country of Ours. The time period I’m reading through covers the Reformation and the grand Inquisition both of which have very upsetting consequences. This has brought up theological, governmental and philosophical questions. I’ve emailed my pastor with theological questions that I’ve had regarding my historic readings. It’s been a lot of fun to engage more deeply.
Gaining Sympathy with my students
The next benefit I’m seeing is that I’m able to understand what tools, resources, and possible stumbling blocks that my children may run into as they work through this book. I’m also seeing some assignments that will be natural and life-giving for them as we go through this time period and learn about all of the explorers. I am using the MapTrek Outlines ebook to help me have easily tracible maps from our time period. This is one error I’ve made with maps in the past: we would look at the map and painfully try to draw from sight. This is unnecessary and painful. Use a window or a light board and trace those babies onto your page and call it a day. In the below picture, I show the Frixion erasable pens I used to draw in the explorer routes. In the top left you see the model that I traced and used as a guide for which explorers I wanted to include on my map. If I didn’t recognize a name, it didn’t go on the map. The key with this notebook is the author/artist is MAKING DECISIONS about what is going into the book (within boundaries) and how we’d like to display the information on the page. This freedom is what creates the self-generating energy for each person to be engaged with the work.
A few tips about the above photo
✨I used Frixion erasable pens for the colored lines.
✨I recommend the Micron pens for the black outlines as they don’t smudge with watercolor.
✨I drew the lines first and painted second but the order doesn’t matter.
✨I kept the sea mostly white so that the explorers routes would pop more noticeably.
✨I used my phone (search function), the MapTrek map of explorers, and The First Book of Americans by Joy Hakim to help get the routes placed correctly.
✨My paper definitely buckles. I’m torn about using watercolor paper bc it would be too thick to trace from. As long as I use a big watercolor brush and minimal water, it seems to be sufficient. Once I close the book it flattens out enough.
Considering Field Trips and Experiences
The most surprising benefit from keeping is the list I’m creating for all of the field trips and activities I’d like to enjoy this year with my children. If I waited to read this book with my children each week, (unless I knew to do this), I would not have considered the possibilities that we could actually go and see some of these places in person since we live in the South and can get to many within a day’s drive.
Some final photos for you of my notebooks. I counted out the pages I would need for the narrations for This Country of Ours. I found that I use about one full page per chapter with my more thorough narrations. Some chapters I use half a page. I placed removeable tabs to mark the pages I’ll use for narration within each notebook. This way I can have multiple books going and not need a million notebooks. They can stay in one place. (Keeping in mind I’m only reading this deeply with ONE book at a time. I will spend time doing a quicker read of other books, but I’ll still be able to use my weekly notebook sessions for those.)
Logistics:
My summer pre-reading needed to be organized, because the amount of books became overwhelming to me. Here’s the checklist I’ve made for myself to help me set my goals for reading. I’m not going to make it with my June list, but I feel accomplished because of the work I’ve done in my notebook and know that I can keep making ground with some of the reading I’ll continue to do throughout the summer.
What I have done each day is 30 minutes plus a narration from This Country of Ours. Then once per week, for one hour on Sundays I’ve been drawing in my Mother Culture Notebook. This has been a restful pace, but when our schedule was busy I couldn’t add more reading than that.
I’ll leave you with a picture of the timeline I enjoyed working through inspired by my reading. It really did become something that I craved to create to help me keep all of the names straight. What about you? How do you organize your pre reading? How do you keep from being overwhelmed in the process? Please share
Supplies I use for Notebook Keeping:
beautiful! and He will make everything beautiful in it's time :)
Gosh this is helpful. And so inspiring! ✨