Keeping a Record of Our Homeschool Life with Commonplace Books

These little books have become an essential part of our family’s holiday tradition.

The holidays are always a little weird when you don’t really celebrate Christmas but it feels like everybody else in the world does. We do some Christmasy stuff: We bake cookies (black bottom cookies are my favorite), we drive around and look at lights, we hang stockings because stockings are fun and can hold a lot of chocolate. But we really celebrate Hanukkah, which is often over before the winter break even starts. Which means winter break is kind of a weird time for us.

So to make these last weeks of the year special, we’ve invented all kinds of little traditions: We pick out a new game together and play it marathon-style over the week between Christmas and New Year’s. (I’m so excited that my parents got us Gloomhaven this year, which I have been wanting like crazy but which is just crazy expensive.) I knit everyone a new sweater-ish thing over the year and present them with much fanfare on the Solstice. (In case you’re curious, this year I made my — eighth? — Fisherman’s Pullover, my second Teddywidder, and my first The Dude, of which I am particularly proud. I wish I could take better knitting pictures. Do you have tips for how to take better knitting pictures?) On the same day, I also present each of my kids with a commonplace book that I’ve made for them over the course of the year.

I started this tradition when my daughter was born. She had to have heart surgery right after she was born — she’s fine! — and so I spent the first six weeks of her life in uncomfortable hospital rooms. I read her Finnegans Wake (which seemed like the perfect confusing thing to read in a confusing time) and The Rattle-Bag, and I kept a little notebook, where I wrote down all the things she did (which, frankly, wasn't much, but everything seemed miraculous to me at the time), and all the things I thought, and the lines from what I read that I thought she liked best or that reminded me of her. I got to bring her home eventually, and I entered that sleep-deprived, what-am-I-doing fog of new motherhood, but I made notes occasionally in that little notebook, and at the end of the year, I put it in a box, thinking that someday, she might enjoy reading those memories of her first year. And I kept doing it — and when my son was born, six years later and perfectly healthy, thank goodness, I started a book for him, too. I didn’t do anything special with them — just tossed them in a memories box with their home-from-the-hospital outfits and tiny plastic hospital bracelets.

It wasn’t until my daughter was 7, and we started homeschooling, that our commonplace books assumed a real purpose. We started homeschooling in the middle of the year, and I’d done tons of research and preparation, but, you guys, I had no idea what I was doing. I worried so much. All the time. It’s funny now to think about how much time I spent worrying about what a 2nd grader was learning and whether it was enough or too much or the right stuff. Now when people worry about that kind of thing to me, I remind them that it’s 2nd grade! You have all the time in the world! Kids learn at their own speed — and they learn in spite of your best efforts and your most egregious mistakes. They are made to learn! 

Because I keep little notebooks for everything (see also: 20 years of dinner menus, knitting projects, historical markers I have visited, 35 years — gulp— of reading lists), I started a little homeschooling notebook that would become our first commonplace book. 

Commonplace books are one of the things I learned about in all my frantic homeschool research — they’re basically learning scrapbooks, and everyone seems to have their own way of using them. I jot down all the things that make an impression on me over the course of the year: interesting things the kids say, stories from history or science or philosophy that we love, cool projects or papers they kids work on, poems or short passages or quotes that inspire conversations. I keep a running booklist for each kid in my planner as part of our homeschool record-keeping, and in December, I transfer that list (in tidy handwriting!) to each commonplace book. I write little notes to each kid a couple of times a year, just when I’m inspired, to tell them how I’m proud of them for sticking to a hard project or impressed with their hard work or appreciative of their willingness to try something after failing. (I try to focus on celebrating the work pieces and not the success pieces of their learning life, but that’s a me-thing.) I’ll include a few things from my own reading life that make me think of them — a poem or a quote or a piece of art.

These books aren’t fancy. I keep one for each kid, and I’m busy, and if I tried to make them “perfect,” I would never do them. I do my best to write neatly, but if I make a mistake, I just draw a line through it and carry on — that’s what I would want my kids to do if they made a mistake. Sometimes I type things up or cut things out of books or magazines and tape them into the books. I’ve included recipes, directions for card games, museum stickers, and photographs. Flipping back through the books, you can see the rhythm of each year emerge and the personalities and interests of my children developing, changing, and deepening. I use smallish books, and I slice out empty pages at the end so they don’t make me feel guilty if I haven’t managed to fill up Every Single Page one year. (I have also made extra pages when I need them by folding them in and taping them in place.)

The kids enjoy paging through them, remembering the year — there’s always a lot of laughing, and “oh, I almost forgot about that!” as they flip through. And they’re careful about keeping them — my daughter keeps hers in her fancy locked bookcase (she loves that she has a bookcase with a door and a key), and my son keeps his on the top shelf of his closet bookcase with his Minecraft guides. I don’t think they revisit them often during the rest of the year, but I hope that someday, they’ll be a reminder of our homeschool days together. For me, they're already a celebration of "the good stuff," and one that I love has become a holiday tradition for our family.

This is republished from a 2019 post on the HSL Patreon.

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