Notebooking

There's lots to do today, so what am I doing?  Planning a modern history course for 8th grade next year.   The problem with this is:  1)  I don't know if I'll need to if we decide to stick with Aquinas Learning.  I think Becky will truly miss it, so we might very well not go out on our own again.   But since we are kind of torn about staying with it or not, my homeschooling/planning obsessed imagination is running wild.  2)  This is next year and I still really need to get through this year, but as usual, the future always looks brighter than the nitty gritty of right now.

I've been enjoying myself though.  One thing I'd like to do is use the many resources that we already have, some of which never got used with the older kids.

The spines for our study would be two resources that I'd read aloud:  Famous Men of Modern Times (that's for European history) and Christ and the Americas - for American history, obviously.  I was thinking that we would have two blocks a week to work on history.  I'd read Famous Men on one day and from Christ and the Americas on another.  After the reading, we'd either work on something to put in the notebook, or maybe just read on our own or watch a movie.  I am looking forward to field trips as well.

I  plan to have lots of independent-read books placed in order together on a couple of shelves in the study.  Becky could choose from those to read various biographies, historical fiction or non-fiction books pertaining to what we are studying and what interests her the most.

I also have a list of movies that will go along with our study.

So I was thinking the way to pull all this together might be notebooking.

I've never really done notebooking before.  I've been researching around the internet and trying to get some ideas.  I think I am more inclined to use an actual binder, but bindering sounds painful, so I guess the better word is notebooking.

I am thinking that the binder would have several sections:

1)  Copy work - famous quotes, poetry, speeches, opening lines of books she's reading, etc.
2)  Timeline - Becky could build a timeline for the period we'll be studying - I'd make this simple.
3)  Maps - need to get a good source for this
4)  Book and movie reviews.  Maybe field trip reviews too.
5)  Visuals - perhaps sketches/imitations of famous paintings/pictures of famous buildings or landmarks/famous photos, etc

I think it sounds fun, is loosely structured enough that Becky can make a lot of her own choices and be creative when she wants to be, and at the same time will be a vehicle for a satisfying study.