This week, my adult daughter was going through the boxes we have stored for her. She will be married in a few weeks, and she was deciding what items she wanted to bring with her into her new home. She came across her boxes of school notebooks. As a homeschooled student, she diligently recorded her daily schedule, her tasks completed, a report on what she’d read and how she’d spent her time. “I practiced the piano for an hour a day when I was twelve!” she said. She completed hour-long practice sessions for many years, but she had forgotten. Looking back on her daily records helped her remember how many years she has spent in diligent study.
We continue to use the notebook as a valuable tool in our family school toolbox. What I ask my children to record each day has evolved over the years, but most of what is in that notebook is left to their discretion. I just ask them to record what they want to tell me about. As a mother of seven, it’s been extremely helpful for children to compile their own records of their daily proceedings because I want to know what each child is doing and thinking. But I also don’t want constant interruptions. When children record their doings and thoughts in their school notebook, I can read through their writing at a time when I can focus on them and give them valuable feedback. Whether we review and discuss their notebook record in a personal interview or I simply read, write comments, and only personally chat about select items, the school notebook is a valuable tool for communication and learning.
While we also keep journals, the school notebook is a record more for the purpose of record keeping between parent and child. I don’t want to micromanage my children in regards to how they use each minute of their time. The notebook helps guide them towards self management. They can look back on their day and see their effectiveness for themselves.
Books like My Side of the Mountain, Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women show similar examples of tasks completed intermixed with thoughts. We likewise have included a mix of purposes in our school notebooks. Some of the things we’ve asked our kids to record include: get-ready tasks: pray, make bed, get dressed, brush, clean room, do hair; family chores; school subjects completed; reports on learning, such as a brief report on what they liked from their readings, finances: money earned, money spent, goals.
We often made the selection and purchase of a new notebook a special event. In most cases, records of this kind are strictly a tool. More essential learning is formalized into a journal or paper or book. But when my soon-to-be married daughter looked through her childhood school notebooks, she found that they still brought her joy–each one, even the six notebooks from 2020, and the few that she only filled halfway because she just wanted to buy herself a new notebook. I haven’t been as consistent at insisting on regular notekeeping as I would have liked, but that felt like a win. Learning to find joy in the discipline of daily record keeping can come to all of us as we practice and continue to pursue the habit. As Louisa May Alcotts tells us, “Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell.”
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