Kick your field trips up a notch with notebooking at the museum

Lately I’ve been having my kids take their notebooks with them on field trips.  This is a small thing, but it’s helped our retention for field trips and a basis for discussions later in our homeschooling. It’s become one of my basic homeschool how to, notebooking at the museum.

Hi! Future Ticia 2023, I’m updating this post, and will pipe in with things I know now after graduating kids.

Why we’re notebooking at the museum

For us, it’s a great way to immediately write down what we observe.  It also helps to increase their observation skills in general.  They really look at what we’re studying and draw what they see.

Depending on the type of assignment they’re also looking much more closely at the museum.  At times I’ve had them look for a specific thing.  You know the “Find this thing in the museum and write about it.”  Other times, and this is the more often one, it’s open-ended.  Write and draw about what you find interesting.

Future Ticia 2023, many museums will have packets you can download ahead of the field trip and those sometimes have notebooking pages or questions to answer.

I’ve also created some, like when we went to Colonial Williamsburg while studying Colonial America, I created notebooking pages for each trade.

That’s how my kids ended up writing about cotton production in Texas.  They drew the part of it that intrigued them.

It was interesting to me that they didn’t write about the trail kitchen they spent an hour playing in.

Or the geography area we spent another 45 minutes in.

It’s not as if the Williamson Museum is a big one.  I rather like it because it’s small and very hands-on.  The kids can happily wander around in it trying all of the exhibits out and getting a feel for it all.

I actually went there this particular time because I remembered a KKK exhibit, and I wanted to show the kids how scary that was.  They’d rotated the exhibits to something different (cotton production), so it didn’t serve its purpose for our history lesson, but it worked for a different lesson.  Just observing what is there.

Let’s get practical about notebooking at the museum

Future Ticia here, let’s dig into this more by age-range.  I was doing this way back when my kids were in kindergarten and 2nd grade.  I’m still doing this now when my kids are in sixth grade, and will be doing it all the way through high school (Future Ticia 2023, I did, though scheduling field trips became harder as we got into high school).

General rules for notebooking at the museum

1. Don’t require this for every field trip or museum.  Sometimes just enjoy the experience
2. Have a plan for what you’re doing and why you’re taking notes.  As I mentioned earlier sometimes it’s looking for specific things, sometimes it is write what interests you.

Notebooking at the museum for early elementary

1. Don’t worry about length, spelling, or handwriting (it is really hard to write neatly on a clipboard)
2. Make expectations clear ahead of time, I found my kids would get nervous if they didn’t know ahead of time what to write, and what I expected.  This is not as true now when they are in middle school (this may be because it’s been an expectation since the beginning).
3. Bring along drawing supplies.  Sometimes writing is hard at this age, and they express their thoughts more clearly in pictures.

Notebooking at the museum for middle school

1. Don’t be afraid to require a certain length.  When we went to Colonial Williamsburg while the kids were in sixth grade I required 2-3 sentences per tradesperson.
2. Start to expect them to go beyond observations and write down why this is important or how it affects other things.
3. Allow them time to think through the why and what they’re learning.  Sometimes you might need to force this on the kids to sit for a minute or two.
4. Allow them to write quick impressions at the field trip and flesh it out more later.

Notebooking at the museum for high school

All right, we’ve graduated now.

1. Depending on your goal for the field trip, I would require anywhere from a paragraph per topic or a short essay at the end. Going back to the Colonial Williamsburg and the Williamson Museum. For Colonial Williamsburg that has 20 different trades, I think a short paragraph per trade, and one trade more is written on with why that trade was important is a good plan. For the Williamson Museum, I would expect one topic because it is a small museum.
2. Encourage them to write notes that will lead to complete thoughts. At this point you really want them consolidating their notetaking process.
3. Start having them create citations for their sources.

More homeschooling tips and tricks

• Climbing out of the Homeschool Rut
• Virtual Field Trips
• Animal Report (perfect for a zoo field trip)