Why Note Taking is a Life Skill

Effective note-taking is an valuable skill that can support not only your child’s learning experience but also help them organize thoughts, enhance memory retention, and communicate more effectively. These life skills create confidence and independence. As a homeschool parent, you have the unique opportunity to teach this skill early on, helping your child build a strong foundation for academic. But when is the right time to start? And how can you guide your child to take notes that are both organized and meaningful?

Draft

Within the first lesson of History Series, Dave Raymond teaches note-taking, while sharing practical tips to help your child develop this essential skill in a way that fits their learning style.

Both Anna and Jean Louise are Compass Classroom Tutors that specialize in one-on-one instruction on taking notes specifically for our online courses. You can find additional tutors at Tutoring from Compass Classroom for all our courses.

Dave Raymond – Antiquity

How to Take Notes

But one thing to keep in mind when you’re taking notes is number one, you’re not gonna try to write down every single word that’s there. That’s gonna be an impossibility, at least for most people. What you really need to get down is what’s the main point? So in fact, if you wanna put down a note, you can say number one, record the main point, or record the main idea. This is the question you should always be asking, like, why is he talking about all these details? Like, what’s the point going on here? That’s what you want to capture. Number two, it’s often helpful to make an outline of some kind. And you can maybe have a parent or have a teacher show you some of the ways you can make outlines and things like that.

But if you make an outline that has kind of basic titles for different sections, you just want to make sure you flesh it out.

You add some of the details. you add some of the stories, you add maybe some minor points that we’ve talked about in our classes. I also recommend if possible that when you’re making your outline, you leave in spaces, you maybe indent lines, so that it almost looks like stair steps in terms of how your words are on the page instead of one gigantic block of text ’cause that gets a little bit hard to look at later on. I have some students even who love to use different colors of pen or pencil or markers even as they write their notes, their notes become almost like works of art.

If that’s you, awesome. Third, I would encourage you when you’re taking notes that you follow my pace. Look for what I emphasize. So if I kind of slow down for something, if I repeat a certain idea, if I seem to kind of pause and talk about something for a long time, you should probably write down something about that.

That’s gonna be important. And by important, I don’t mean important for the test. That’s really not the whole purpose of that. I mean important for remembering a certain time or a certain feature of history and why it matters ultimately. Fourth, it is a history class, so you do need to do things like record key people, record key events and dates, key places, key ideas.

You need to actually know the nuts and the bolts, the grammar of history, the basic facts, ’cause you can’t tell the story without the basic facts. Fifth, when it comes to stories themselves, I recommend that when you’re writing down or trying to record parts of a longer story, that instead of trying to write the whole story down, you just record major parts of it.

You record major characters and things that happened. And so that way, you’re not trying to get down every single thing. And this would also be the same for quotes. So when we come to a quote, it may be a really short quote, you can write down the whole thing. Excellent, of course, this is a video, you can also pause it and take time to write down every word if you want. But often quotes are quite long and quite laborious to actually write down every detail of them. So it might be helpful to just write down who said the quote and then write down the main idea of the quote. And you’ll find that I often explain what the quote is all about. Finally, you should be prepared to write most of the time while you’re watching these videos. You can, of course, pause and take breaks, something that my live classroom students probably wish they could do, but the point is this, prepare to write the whole time.

You really should be writing the entire time, recording as much as you can, not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of knowing these stories, so they begin to shape you and change you.

Reviewing Your Notes

Use them for studying.

Dave Raymond – American

I want to go over with you how to take notes. After all, there’s going to be five lectures for every lesson. And in each of these short lectures, you’re going to need to take notes. You’re going to need to diligently write what it is that I’m telling you. Not word for word. I don’t want you to transcribe everything that I tell you. That’s not necessary, nor would that be helpful. But what you do need to learn is how do you record the most important information. So if you haven’t already begun taking notes, I want you to do so right now. Pull out that paper, pull out that pen or pencil, and begin to write. In fact, we’ll call this section “How to Take Notes.” Now the first thing I want to tell you about taking notes, and it’s something that you’ll see in every single one of the lessons that I give you this year, is there’s always a principle. In other words, usually the very first lecture video is going to be called “The Principle.” And the principle is always the main idea. It’s always the big picture for that week’s lesson that we’re going to be unpacking. In other words, no matter how much information we have, there’s always one standard idea that I really want you to take away. So you need to make certain you know what the principle is each week that you do this, or each lesson that you spend studying American history.

Main Idea or Principle

It’ll always primarily be there in the first lecture, but that main idea will be touched on in every single lecture that week, or every single lecture for that lesson.

Asking Questions

So you need to always be thinking, have it written down of course what the principle is, but you need to always be thinking, “Why is Mr. Raymond teaching this to me?” “Why does he seem to make this idea, or make this person, or make this event important?” “Why is it necessary?” You should always be asking yourself that question of “Why?” I’m not teaching this to you just so you can spend time doing something. Or just so you can fulfill some kind of credit or some kind of requirement you have for your education. Sure, you have to take American History at some point or another, but that’s not why you’re doing it. Or at least, that’s not why you should be doing this. You should be doing this to actually know the wisdom of the past and to actually apply it in your life. So you always need to be asking yourself the question, “Why is this idea important? Why do we need to know about this person?” and then begin to answer those questions based upon what I tell you. Secondly, you have to understand that in each of these lectures, I’m just giving you basic information. In fact, each lecture has essentially a title, which you can see in the table of contents of your reader. But even so, you can’t just write down the title. You have to write down information that I give you. You need to be fleshing out this kind of bare-bone skeleton that is provided on that table of contents. In other words, write down not just who someone was and maybe their dates of when they lived, but you need to know why were they important?

What is it that motivated them? What did they believe? And of course, what did they do? How did they do it? When did they do it? Where did they do it? In other words, key people, key events, key dates, key places, and especially the ideas and the beliefs that motivated these people, those are absolutely essential.

Pause the Lesson

You need to make certain you write those things down. Another thing you need to look out for is my pace. Sometimes I speed up, sometimes I slow down, sometimes I’ll repeat something in a different way, or I’ll simply slow down to emphasize a certain point. If I do that in these lectures, you better bet that I’m going to actually want you to know that information. You better write that down. And of course, you have the luxury of being able to pause this, of being able to take your time, of being able to go back and re-watch, to review what it is that I’ve actually taught you. You’re also going to find that there’s going to be occasions where I tell you a story. The story might be short, the story might be long. If it’s a long story, you’re probably not going to be able to write down everything that happened in the story. And so what you need to do is you need to practice the art of summarizing. You need to be able to take a famous story, for example, say the story of Noah and the flood. And instead of writing down everything that happened in that story, which is told in Genesis, you figure out, okay, what were the key ideas?

Dave Raymond – Modernity

Watch the Lecture, Take Your Own Notes – Review Your Child’s Note and Provide Feedback

And I also want to give you some really basic skills in note-taking. After all, this is a lecture class. I’m going to be teaching you through stories, through events, through people, through famous dates and things like that. There’s going to be a lot to write down. It’s going to take some diligence, take some work on your part. But that’s something that we need to go over and kind of discuss how do you actually record notes well. How do you actually listen and kind of figure out what to write down in your notes and on the page and so forth. And a lot of that is kind of trial and error. With my students, I’m often having to take a look at what they’ve actually written down and actually coach them based upon what they actually look at. So in your case, you’ll be needing to go to one of your parents or go to, perhaps you have a teacher, an administrator who’s kind of, or a facilitator that is, who’s kind of giving you these lessons. You’ll need to maybe check with them about taking notes. But often you’re writing down what you think is the most important. 

Printing the Lesson Transcript

Highlighting the transcript, take notes in the margin.

Of course, there are other solutions for taking notes if you are using any online course from Compass Classroom. Economics for Everybody, for instance, includes a free study guide. Print it out and allow your student to take notes right on the printed pdf., using the scope and sequence as a guide for offline study habits.