Homeschool Notebooking: It’s Not Just for Kids!

I can’t stop looking at moss this spring. A neighbor found me yesterday, nose to the ground, exclaiming over spore cases. Thankfully, she was of a sympathetic turn of mind and paused to extol the virtues of moss before heading down the path. The poetry of their names fills my notebook: bog-bead moss, fountain moss, foxtail moss, windswept broom moss. Trying to capture the exact green and gesture of each variety in my notebook has made me see so much more than I ever bothered to notice right under my feet.

When I was new to homeschooling, I bought lovely, expensive nature journaling supplies. A few botched attempts left me spooked and our supplies neglected. I read confusing passages about “brush drawing” from which I ascertained only that we should make lines and blobs with a dry brush. (Just exactly how dry a brush must be to qualify as dry, I’ll never know.) But since Charlotte Mason decreed six brush-drawn sketches be included each term in our nature notebooks, I felt doomed from the start.

Over the years, I’ve loosened up my legalistic approach considerably. Maybe doing something imperfectly but enjoying it and learning from it counts for more than perfection. I began the process of salvaging nature journaling for our homeschool by beginning my own nature journal apart from our curriculum. Thus I found the freedom to experiment and find ways that worked for un-artistic me.

Watching John Muir Law’s Nature Journal Connection videos gave me my first glimpse of hope. He encourages not just sketching, but words. Words? Words! I have no clue how to draw, but I love words. Maybe I never have to draw at all! Maybe I can just describe what I see. Wait, not so fast! When I watched his video on using colored pencils, I suddenly, against my wiser instincts, found myself actually wanting to draw. I mean, wow, you can blend layers of colored pencils like paint without ever having to worry if your brush is dry enough!

I also used to get terribly worried about creating a nature study schedule to perfectly coordinate with the seasons so we could always find the right stuff to draw when we went outside. This approach felt utterly discouraging until I realized the whole point of nature study is realizing that we can’t force nature to display its treasures on demand. We can only sally forth with open eyes and ears for whatever nature chooses to reveal that day. If we don’t find a beautiful specimen to draw, or if the weather thwarts our plans, we can sketch and take notes from our nature books, learning from how the illustrator chose to portray the subject. With this new relaxed approach, my girls sometimes feel inspired to sketch in their journals without my prompting.

Nature journaling slowly changed from an inscrutable duty to an enjoyable hobby. I began wanting to enlarge this pastime of learning through writing and sketching to other fields of study. I’ve frequently encouraged my girls to make little books about their history topics, and they still enjoy flipping through their creations. But as middle school years approach, we’ve fallen more into a default mode of written narrations recorded in plain spiral notebooks. I did have them each begin a Book of Centuries this year and am pleased with how much they look forward to working in it.

I decided to approach this broader notebooking venture the same way I started nature journaling – trying it for myself outside of school hours. I made my own Book of Centuries and commonplace book and for about a year they gathered dust. I’m a minimalist, and three notebooks are apparently two too many. Also, just copying quotes into a commonplace book without interacting with them further seemed unfulfilling. I felt stymied, enslaved again to the rules dictating separate notebooks kept in a specific way.

Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. The title alone brought back memories of my seven-year-old self scribbling stories in a spiral notebook. The Notebook pronounced the solution to my notebooking quandary in one magical and musical word: zibaldoni. Zibald-what? Well, here’s how Allen defines it:

“The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like “mess” or “jumble” (64).

Ah, “jumble” – that seems an apt definition of my life, so maybe a zibaldoni would work for me. I read on to learn what people wrote in these notebooks.

“In a word: everything. Poems in Latin, poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs, recipes, lists… ‘gate tolls and currency exchange rates…alongside medical recipes, devotional tracts, lauds, and love lyrics’” (66).

Intrepid as any fourteenth-century Florentine, I selected one notebook and began making it the sole repository for my jumble. I wanted to learn more about the rufus-sided towhee since these birds came in droves during this winter’s storms, so I spent one afternoon sketching and taking notes from a bird book. My next next entry includes quotes from The Faerie Queene. And a few pages later I jotted notes, along with my own ponderings and questions, from Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World. In Book-of-Centuries style, I’m sketching maps and historical artifacts as I read and making timelines.

I love the creativity and simplicity of learning this way. I get a million times more out of my reading when I write and draw about it, and I remember what I read so much better. I love to look back on my pages and remember the fun of thinking about a particular topic.

I also appreciate how inexpensive all this is. Truly just a few simple supplies are needed. After much trial and error, I found the best notebook for me is this 7″x10” cheap and sturdy hardcover blank book. (There’s nothing like an expensive notebook to stress me out about making the quality of my work worthy of the price.) I love velvety smooth Derwent drawing pencils (worth the splurge) and a small set of Prismacolor pencils (you don’t need a huge set because you can layer the colors to create the shade you want).

I plan to continue having my girls keep separate notebooks – after all, they have a whole school day allotted to their learning and notebook-keeping, and I think they’ll stay organized better that way. But for me, a busy, distracted mom pulled in many directions, one notebook I can pop in a bag with a zip-pouch of pencils means the difference between a notebook that gets used regularly and one that sits on the shelf. A final word: I share photos of our notebooks with you not because I think they exhibit any degree of artistic virtuosity, but in the hope you’ll see joyful learning in them. I’m actually glad our sketches aren’t all that great; if they were, you might feel as discouraged as I have in the past looking at other people’s work. I hope you’ll take our ordinary efforts as permission to play with colored pencils, to revel in a world of lovely learning, and to look under your feet next time you go outdoors.