Notebooking: Germany

We’ve had a light week notebooking Germany – mainly because of VBS.  I am getting more comfortable with what notebooking will look like for us as we progress from Portugal!

A great post about notebooking this week is from Jimmie (The Notebooking Fairy - I use all her sheets) at Homegrown Learners, Getting Started with Notebooking.

As for Germany … it took a few days to get my son to stop saying, “Nazis” every time we talked about Germany.  His idea of Germany is Indiana Jones fighting Hitler.  I explained, “I am German – that does not make me a Nazi.  Which also makes you German and you are not a Nazi”.  (the boy has German on both sides with grandparent’s names Neuwirth and Albright).  So naturally our first vocabulary word was Nazi.

We studied the topography of the country, the flag, the many castles, wild animals (some I had never heard of – pine marten?), and again the Black Death since there are so many different rat species in Germany!

We picked up the Albert Einstein biography – Who Was Series this is a great little book for boys who like to ask questions.  My son was shocked that he was always in trouble at school for asking questions -“isn’t that where we’re supposed to ask questions”?  He definitely appreciates homeschool a bit more this week.

 We also enjoyed some pretzels too (store bought).  Even though we didn’t have a recipe to write down — I had the boy look up “pretzel” in his dictionary. Translation: little thing with arms

We read a few of the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales – Cinderella (had no idea there were some crazy pedicures going on then), Little Red Riding Hood / Riding Cap (love loading the wolf’s belly with rocks), Snow White (those were some crazy hot iron shoes for the wicked witch), and Rapunzel – which the boy liked best because the prince fell out of the tower and his eyes were pricked out.

 Many German composers – we focused mainly on Bach and Beethoven (Young Scholar’s Guide to Composers – printables).  I didn’t realize they were born almost 100 years apart!

After the week I looked back and was a bit curious why we didn’t have pages and pages of notebooking information.  Then I figured it out — what we had discussed or read from National Geographic Kids was never written down.  Discussion is great – but writing it down is really where notebooking comes to life (also shows what kids are comprehending).

I am hoping to be a bit more intentional when we head to Greece!

You can follow me on Twitter to keep up with our notebooking on Instagram!

Notebooking Friends — Do you allow your student to plan out their notebooks or do you decide what should go in it ??

*some notebooking pages from Notebooking Fairy