In addition to the Imaginary Island work we’re doing with our friends, my kids have been doing some notebooking. They’ve asked to work on their islands a few times during the weeks, or talked more about what we’ve been learning. It’s been nice to spend some time together sitting around, coloring and discussing what they’re creating for their islands.
So far they’ve notebooked about the geography of their islands – really, they wrote about the research questions on the first pages of my Island Research Guide. After doing this research on a real island, it only made sense to record the same information about their imaginary island. I saw this work really solidify what they wanted their island to be like, and let them start imagining and planning what may come next.
Next, after building their hands on elevation maps I offered a couple of elevation map images and asked them to write a notebooking definition page.
A few weeks later we created some climate notebooking pages.
Finally – for now – they created some biome notebooking pages. We all enjoyed doing these, so I plan to incorporate some more.