Celeste at Joyous Lessons is hosting a link-up where we can share examples of how we are implementing Charlotte Mason’s ideas on “Keeping”: nature notebooks, Books of Centuries, commonplace books, to name some of the more popular ones. This is an area I definitely have room to improve in (especially nature notebooks, sigh). But both my daughter and I have started commonplace books in the past year, and I wanted to share a couple of photos of them. We both use a Decomposition Book, which is really just a glorified composition book, but it comes in pretty prints which makes in more fun to use. 🙂
This is the first page of my commonplace book. I like to use different colors of pens for different kinds of entries. So I chose purple for Bible passages, because it’s my favorite color. Light blue is for poetry (I just love this poem by Robert Frost!), and green is for education (growth!) – in this case some quotes from The Living Page, which is the inspiration for Celeste’s link-up. 🙂 And other colors for other subjects/genres. I have since stopped putting quotation marks around my quotes, because it seemed rather redundant!
Here’s a page from Miss A’s commonplace book. She also uses colored pens, although she started out with pencil. Then I found out about erasable pens, and bought her a pack. Apparently she color codes by what day of the week it is instead of by the type of book or genre. I encourage her to write at least three entries a week, one of them from the Bible. It is interesting to see what catches her fancy while reading. 🙂
Stop by Celeste’s blog for more example of Keeping!
My kids use the same Frixion pens for their copybooks and they *love* them–especially my perfectionist daughter. 😉 The Living Page has a prime place in my own commonplace too! Thank you for sharing! 🙂
Anna, I love the idea of using different colored pens for a commonplace and especially the reminder of erasable pens. How beautiful.
Very cool! I love that A uses colors for days of the week. I like the requirements you've set her, too. I like your reasons for colors, too … Unfortunately yellow wouldn't be a good color for writing Bible verses in. So far, I've been choosing colors arbitrarily.
Stopping by from the Keeping link-up, Anna, and I love the photos of your commonplace book. I use different colors of ink, too, and sometimes even embellish the pages. :)I hope to post some photos next week.
~Blessings,
Lisa
Thanks for visiting and commenting, ladies. 🙂