Prairie and Sea notebooks for Sarah and Skylark

[Michelle Pfeifer]

What are these supposed to look like? I understand everyone's will look different, but I don't know that I'm doing what I'm supposed to with this.

We are halfway through Sarah, Plain and Tall and DS has one page for the prairie and one page for the sea. And even those aren't complete. When asked to list every plant or animal mentioned in the chapter, he writes down the first one he comes across and calls it done. I did request that he draw a gopher and you would have thought I asked him to build one from bone and muscle. :eek:

Help!

Michelle

[Heather W]

Michelle we had a good time with these notebooks when my oldest did Sarah Plain and Tall.

Here's a link to what his notebook (http://blogshewrote.blogspot.com/search/label/sarah) looked like here and there.

Aside from what are worksheets, I actually listed out what animals/plants he would have to find out about. You can see those on notebook paper with my handwriting on them. Then he drew pictures and sometimes said a little something about them.

[Suz MamaFrog]

We make scrapbooks using a combination of notebooking pages, worksheets, drawings/artwork, and mini-books (the little books you use to make lapbooks.)

Here's a list of what's in Miss K's Prairie and Sea notebooks:

Prairie:

*map of US with Great Plains/prairie states colored, definition of "prairie" written beside map
*watercolor painting of prairie scene
*page of mini-books from HSS on groundhogs/woodchucks
*page of mini-books from HSS on birds of prey
*page with hand-drawn diagram of what a "thermal" is and how birds use them to fly
*definition of "windbreak"
*mini-book about marsh hawks
*study starter pages with info on meadowlarks, kildeer and turkey vultures
*mini-book with drawings and descriptions of clover, violets, wild roses and bride's bonnet plants

Sea:

*two pages of mini-books from HSS on whales
*3 pages of mini-books from HSS on seals
*a page with a diagram and definition of sea erosion (this may have been bunny trail we followed after reading about beach preservation in Maine....)
*a page with Sarah's description of the sea, taken from the book, and a fan book with "sea colors" rendered in watercolor pencil
* a page on how fog forms and a diagram of the "fog cycle"
*a page of minibooks on snails, sand dunes and conifer trees
*2 pages of minibooks on mollusks and shells
*a page on sea gulls
*study starter page with info on kittiwakes
*a watercolor painting of a sea scene

We made ours of watercolor paper, with colored cover stock for covers. DD had decided to paste the entire notebook into her scrapbook, pasting it in using the back cover, but our brass paper fasteners pulled through the pages and the books won't stay together. So, for now they are repaired and just tucked away inside her scrapbook.

I assigned her each and every one of the items that was included in her notebooks. She enjoyed doing it, but left on her own probably wouldn't have included half of what we did. She does a lot of her work independently, but has to be told what to do, kwim?? I find that using the mini-books and study starter pages avoids the "build it from muscle and bone" syndrome, because she knows just what I'm asking for, and how much info she needs to include.

Other things which are in her Sarah scrapbook, but not in her Sea or Prairie notebooks are a mini-book of Sarah's "garden" plants, a research report on the plow, a hand-drawn diagram and description of how a squall forms, and maps and info of Maine and Kansas. These things could've been included in her Sea and Prairie notebooks, I suppose, but she chose to include them in her "general info" scrapbook, rather than the others for some reason.

HTH!

Blessings!
Suz

[Melinda]

Between my three girls, we have 3 different styles of notebooks. For the most part, I told them what to add to their notebook, but it was up to them how they did it.

My oldest took it and ran with it, printing out pictures and writing paragraphs about them. She's a journalist in training! :lol:

My twins, however, took made more of an art approach. One girl's pictures are all hand-drawn watercolor paintings, the other used various mediums from watercolors to pastels to pencil sketches to tempra paints. The twins, who don't care to write, were only required to write a sentence from the book, so their writings are more like copywork. These girls are also talkers, so we talked about each topic a whole lot. One of these days I hope they make the jump into writing so we can record what they say, but until then, I'm content to let them talk, talk, talk about their research.

Oh, I placed all of their pages in sheet protectors in a 3-ring binder.