Homeschooling

[pdw 0]

I have found Evernote very helpful this year in our homeschooling. I currently have nine notebooks in my homeschool stack. Of course these can be shared with my son as necessary so that he can access them on his netbook as well.

I have a general homeschool notebook for everything that doesn't fit into other notebooks - quotes, articles, ideas for the future, etc. I have a notebook for receipts (as we can claim reimbursement for some things). I have a notebook for this year's planning notes (goals for the year, outlines of each subject, break down of units, etc.) I have a notebook for this year's work that does not fit into other notebooks. I have a notebook with resources that I want to remember or look into for the future, and pictures of the covers of books that we are using right now (because my mind always blanks when someone asks what we're using for _____ subject.)

I have a "logs" notebook, to keep track of what we're doing covering, sort of a journal.

The best notebooks, however, are the units/unit study notebooks. What a simple way to keep notes together, scrapbook/lapbook, bookmark resources, and produce a record of what you have done for a unit. As we are doing research, I can clip web pages. If we have questions to look up, want to make notes of what we have learned from a book, etc., we can add a note. If we are out on a field trip we can take pictures. My son is very visual, and we often start with a google image search, and I find the Evernote printscreen capture a great way to capture both the initial results of a search, and more detailed pictures that we find later. It is great to be able to use Wikipedia or Dictionary.com to look up the answer to a question, highlight the appropriate section, and clip it to Evernote to document it for later - both to refer to if we need to refresh our memories, and as proof for our teacher/facilitator of what we have been learning.

I also have a "vocabulary" notebook for words that we look up while reading or working on other subjects that don't fall into the unit notebooks. A quick dictionary.com search to look up the word (I have a Quick Search set up in Firefox so it is almost instantaneous), highlight the answer, and use my Evernote bookmarklet to file it in our notebook. Great for vocab review or proof of learning.

pdw

[photojenic 4]

My son is only 2nd grade, so most of my Evernote homeschool notes are mostly teaching ideas for me. We use TOG so I'm thinking of making a TOG Stack and then adding notebooks for each week of each year plan. (ex: Y1U1W1) Then store ideas to be used the next time we come around to that week. For example; lessons plans, worksheets, craft projects, etc.

I did buy Evernote Premium for my college age daughter. She's not taken the time to learn how to use it.

[Owyn 457]

Instead of a lot of notebooks consider using e.g. "Y1U1W1" as a title prefix and/or as a tag. One notebook for TOG or perhaps one notebook per year would then be all that you needed. I personally lean to very spare use of tags and very descriptive titles. In your use case I would probably just have a "TOG" tag.