As mentioned last week, when the kids took their CKE Earth and Space (affiliate link) test, they failed miserably, so I set about to teach them how to take notes and reteach the entire unit. It doesn’t matter if you know how to take a test if you haven’t taken good notes to study from. We backtracked, and I worked through each chapter of the unit with them to teach kids how to take notes, a skill I hadn’t thought to teach in my homeschooling until then.
Here’s what I’ve been doing to teach the kids how to take notes.
Show kids what is important in the lesson
Most textbooks give clues to what they think are important. Teach your kids how to find those things when taking notes.
- Look for bolded words
- names of people, battles, peace treaties, locations
- Names of sections
- Look at any worksheets or review material ahead of time and write that down
Teach kids how to organize their notes
Once they know what to look for, teach them how to organize their notes. Otherwise, if they’re anything like my kids, their notes will be one big block of text, and they won’t be able to find the answers later. Here are the steps I taught my kids, based on how my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Newbury, taught me.
- At the top of your page, write the title of the notes you’re taking. I like to center it. That helps me know it’s a completely new topic, even if it’s in the middle of the page.
- At the edge of the page (or margin), write definitions if they are not part of a major section or are important topics themselves.
- At the edge of the page (or margin), write section titles and underline them
- indent ideas part of the same topic 2 fingers’ worth of space (in my giant version, it was 1 hand’s worth of space, which greatly amused the boys)
- If it’s another information source for the same topic, also indent 2 fingers worth
Show kids how to add relevant pictures, maps, and diagrams to their notes
This is especially important if your child is a visual learner. It will also help with the kids who are doodlers, because they have a place to add the extra drawings
This can take several different forms; for my kids, so far it’s been drawings, but I foresee a not-too-distant future where we’re cutting out and gluing in maps and other great diagrams from our textbooks. I’m a big fan of random inserts into notes.
As you can see, the kids learned a rather important thing for visual learners: add color. That’s a key for me. I take notes in lots of different colors.
When teaching kids how to take notes, make sure you teach them to make it personal
My kids had different things that caught their fancy. One of my boys added extra illustrations about earthquakes. My other son drew all of the different cave types.
Ultimately, we need to remember it’s their notes. We can give them the tools for how to take notes and what works for us, but it has to work for them; otherwise, the lessons are useless.
Teach your kids how to abbreviate words
When I originally wrote this post, I was giving suggestions for writing notes from reading a textbook, which is remarkably similar to reading comprehension. Now, while my kids take notes from their textbooks, they also take notes from my lectures.
Yes, I give lectures to my kids. I expand on what they read and make sure to emphasize what’s on the test.
When you take notes, you need to create your own shorthand. I have a long list of words that I abbreviate a certain way and some that I abbreviate in circumstances
- gov’t for government, and gov’r for governor, probably from years of reading British books with written accents
- I abbreviate names I frequently use with initials, so in our Texas history notes, I use SFA for Stephen F. Austin, same for FDR, JFK, etc.
- I draw symbols for some words. My kids recognize my shorthand drawing of a woman, and the other symbols I use.
- b/c- because
Teach your kids that when taking notes they can’t write every word
One of the hardest lessons to learn as you learn to take notes is that you can’t write down every word; you just need the important words.
Right now, with my kids in junior high, I’m doing a fair amount of pausing to give them time to catch up on what they are writing. I am slowly decreasing how often I pause because when they get to college, the teachers won’t necessarily pause for them to catch up on their notes.
I also write notes on the overhead for them to get an idea of what it should look like.
Have you taught your kids how to take notes? I’m sure I’ll be revising this lesson in the future with more information for them
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