Welcome back to the 50 Things to Put in a Notebook Series, based on my popular blog post of the same name. Notebooking is versatile and flexible, so don’t ever feel locked into a certain structure for your homeschool notebooks.
Have you ever considered using poems in your notebooks?
Fifty Things to Put into a Notebook: #12 Poems
A Poetry Notebook
If poetry study is a part of your language arts curriculum, you may want to keep a dedicated poetry notebook. Inside you can include
- poems copied onto notebooking pages
- poems printed from the Internet or copied from books
- biographical information about poets
- explanation of poetic forms and poetic language
Poetry Copied into Poetry Notebook
I have a general goal of my daughter’s copying one poem each week for her language arts notebook. Why copy poems? The benefits of copywork are many: handwriting practice, following good models of writing, spelling, and vocabulary. Copying a poem also offers an extended opportunity to focus on it in detail and really absorb it.
Topical Poems
But poetry is not only for the language arts notebook. You can integrate poetry into other academic areas with topical poems such as science poems or math poetry. Below is an example of a poem about ants that my daughter copied after we studied ants during our nature excursions.
Poem About Ants for Nature Study
It just happened that as we were studying ants, she came across a great poem about ants that fit perfectly. If that kind of serendipity doesn’t happen, you can also search out a poem for the topic you are studying.
Another option is to use poetry as the format for your narrations. Below is an example of an acrostic poem that my daughter created after a history study of the Gold Rush. Besides the word play, you can see how the poem demonstrates her understanding of the time period. Instead of a dry paragraph, she could express her learning in a more unique way.
a poem created after our Gold Rush study in history
If you have ever found your notebooks growing boring, just stay tuned to this series as you see how varied they can be. There are at least fifty different ways!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Jimmie! We are dipping our toes into the notebooking sea for the first time this year, and I’m finding your posts (and this website, particularly) extremely beneficial. Poetry is near and dear to my heart, so I especially took note to your suggestions. I love the way you incorporate poetry into other studies. I shared this on Twitter and my FB page!
Absolutely fascinating post, Jimmie! I am definitely going to pin this post for when I need some inspiration for our notebooks. I love the idea of creating a poem for even history. I should have thought of that!