Language Arts through Notebooking

God uniquely fashioned each of your children. He designed them to express themselves in brilliant and creative ways.  

When we give our children the opportunity to freely and authentically express themselves, they develop their voice. And when they develop their voice, they become confident communicators, expressing their ideas, desires and emotions skillfully. They leave our home certain about who they are, ready to share themselves with the world.

But when we—through employing fabricated, formulaic methods of learning—deny our children the opportunity to express themselves, we silence an important aspect of who God made them to be. We muffle their voice.

When it comes to your children’s learning, growth and confidence, nothing is more important than strengthening their expressive language skills. How can we do this? By approaching language arts in a way that develops their ability to think and communicate well both in speaking and writing.  

If you homeschool using Charlotte Mason’s methodologies, you know how much she valued and prioritized notebooking. She believed children should record their ideas and observations from their learning in all the subjects. She also advocated for narration. Charlotte Mason tells us, 

“Narrating is not the work of a parrot, but of absorbing into one’s self the beautiful thought from the book, making it one’s own and then giving it forth again with just that little touch that comes from one’s own mind.” 

What a beautiful way to understand how God designed receptive and expressive language to work together in a child’s learning. The child first takes in, or receives, ideas then gives them forth, expressing what he learned in his unique voice by choosing and combining words in a way all his own. 

This is what notebooking is all about: expressing language through written and oftentimes visual form. 

If your children are notebooking, you’ve already experienced the many benefits of this superior method of learning. But have you thought about how, specifically, notebooking can strengthen your children’s language arts skills?

It starts in the mind with the child’s thinking, the place where learning begins. After the child receives knowledge, he has to ponder what he’s learned. He has to organize his ideas in a meaningful way. He has to express his ideas in language, choosing and ordering words in complete thoughts that are artful and that make sense.

When a child orally narrates his learning, he strengthens his thinking and verbal articulation skills. When you add written narration through notebooking, the child strengthens his writing through integrating and expressing his language arts skills, including grammar, spelling, syntax, vocabulary and punctuation. 

Every time a child writes, he strengthens the most critical language pathways in his brain.

Notebooking provides ample opportunities for this growth to happen.

Because notebooking prompts your child to put forth what he’s assimilated through written and visual narration, as your children notebook through the subjects and through the homeschool years, they’re strengthening their expressive language skills. They’re finding and establishing their voice. They’re building confidence as they offer the gift of language—their words—to others. They’re bringing forth into the world the unique person God fashioned them to be. 

And this is everything. 

I’ve seen this over and over with students in my private Advanced Language and Composition classes. When they begin classes with me, they struggle to write because they’re not given a lot of freedom of expression in school. Often, they’re not sure what to write, and not only what to write, but how to write it. Yet the more they express themselves and find their voice through different types of writing assignments, the more confident and self-aware they become. As their expressive language skills strengthen, they’re able to communicate more effectively and experience deeper community in and out of class. 

It’s truly life transforming for them.

We can offer this same growth and transformation to our children, and we should.

Learning is not truly complete until it’s expressed, which is why notebooking each and every subject is so valuable and so necessary for your children. There are many creative ways they can record their learning through notebooking.

Here are some ways to strengthen language arts skills through notebooking each subject: 

NATURE

In addition to drawing and painting what they observe, your children can describe what they see in writing. Work on their language arts skills by asking them to write a sentence or two telling what they see using adjectives. If they’re describing a living creature, have them use adverbs to tell how it’s moving. Work on capitalization, punctuation and vocabulary. Younger students can write just one word or two words to practice handwriting and spelling. Older students can research the item they included in their notebook and write a short narration, focusing on descriptive language and imagery. 

SCIENCE

If you’re using a living book to study science, have the child read aloud and orally narrate what they read. Then have them put their narration in writing. This is a really good way to strengthen language pathways and is something I do with my students. Sometimes I’ll have them add a visual narration to even further illustrate the learning. By layering the narrations, you strengthen more deeply the pathways of expressive language. 

When our girls were in the early elementary years we did Apologia Science’s Flying Creatures book. I remember they had to draw a bird then label the different parts like the wing, beak and feet. It was the first time they engaged with expressing knowledge through the language of word labels accompanied by pointers. They also gained experience writing hypotheses and recording experiment data with charts and graphs. This was all language arts. Studying the lives of scientists and their discoveries provided opportunities for writing narrations and working on the language arts skills that type of writing required.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY

In addition to writing narrations on important people, inventions, battles and all things history, creating timelines are a fun and creative way to engage with language arts. After illustrating the person or event, have your children practice writing proper nouns with correct capitalization and spelling. If space allows, they can write grammatically parallel descriptions for each timeline entry. Map study is another unique way to express language arts skills through labeling countries, cities and landmarks. They can include flags of countries and create a color-coded map key. Your children can work on spelling, handwriting and consistency in capitalization which are all important language arts elements.

LANGUAGE ARTS

If your children are studying poetry, have them mark the poems to highlight the language elements, word choice and rhyme scheme the author used. For literature, they can write book reviews and character sketches and create story arcs for the narratives they’re studying. Your children can create a vocabulary journal of new words and a reading quilt noting the genres of the books they’ve read. Any time they write, there’s an opportunity to strengthen some element of language arts.

BIBLE

Similar to history and literature, your children can write narrations and character sketches. They can study poetry in the Bible and mark the poetic structures. Scripture copywork, dictation and memorization require foundational language arts skills as your children focus on proper spelling, capitalization and punctuation. Any time your children engage with copywork, they are absorbing sound syntax and learning new vocabulary, which is why it’s critical to choose well written passages to copy. All of this strengthens language pathways important to expressive language development.  

MATH 

Math can be a fun subject to notebook. Head over to Pinterest to find interesting and colorful math notebooking page examples. Your children can write out math concepts or write a narration on what they learned about math that day. They can keep a daily math journal. They can draw and label different graphs, charts and number lines. You can teach them how to write consistent titles for each math concept. In all of their writing and labeling, they are strengthening language arts and expressive language skills. 

BOOK OF MOTTOES

A book of mottoes, also called a commonplace book, is something interesting that Charlotte Mason believed in. It’s simply a collection of quotes and excerpts from books and other writings. Your children can use it to gather thoughts and ideas from their reading across all the subjects. 

The book of mottoes can be strictly just words, but in our homeschool our girls always decorated the page where they recorded their entry. They would copy a quote, Bible verse or book excerpt in their best handwriting with proper spelling, capitalization and punctuation. 

I hope this gives you some ideas for engaging with language arts through notebooking the different subjects. You’ve invested so much time finding the very best living books with the best living ideas for your children to take in—all the beautiful, wonderful curriculum and living books you’ve spent hours poring over at the conventions and on the curriculum websites. 

Your children are going to receive all you’ve chosen for them through this receptive language God has given. But equally, they need to express it—or their learning will not be complete. They need to think about it and assimilate it to come up with concepts and ideas. Then they need to choose from all the words they know and assemble them in a way that creates language they can express and write down in their unique voice. 

And when your children layer their written narration with visual narration through notebooking, the learning is so much deeper and so much more enjoyable.

Your children will associate writing with joy while fully expressing all of who God made them to be.

I’ve created for you a PDF with ideas for notebooking each subject and I’d love to send it to you. You can find it here by scrolling to bottom of my website.

At the beginning of the week, think about your homeschool lessons and what you can add to the notebook. Plan to work on language arts skills every time your children create a notebook page no matter the subject. It can be as simple as learning a few vocabulary words or writing a well-structured paragraph. It’s all language arts and there are many skills waiting to be discovered and honed in each notebook page created.

Think of how much language learning you can accomplish if you view every notebooking assignment with this in mind. 

Rather than depending on a grammar workbook or writing program, integrate your children’s language arts learning into all the subjects throughout the day. This is a much more natural and authentic approach that results in the goal of language arts—your children confidently and artfully expressing themselves in powerful and inspiring ways that connect them to others and reflect the image of God in them.