Last year my then pre-reading first grader came home one day excited to show me something. He was talking about Hanukkah notes that he had taken. At the time, he and his classmates were still in the early stages of learning to read. Writing still took an awful long time. I could not imagine exactly what his notes would look like, but was excited to see what he had come up with.
Hanukkah Notes
His results were really cute and quite understandable. I was pretty excited with what he came up with and kept sharing them with everyone in reach to see if they could “read” them too. They do require some pre-knowledge, but otherwise they are extremely clear drawings of the laws of Hanukkah.
Visual Note Taking
One of the things I was excited about was the act of visual note taking. Last year I was very into getting note taking instruction better implemented into my daughter’s set of tools (and ideally into the skill set of her classmates too.) I felt that children in 4-6th grade do not always have those skills and really need them. I spent a bit of time looking up different techniques. Cornell notes was one popular choice, but so was visual note taking. These Hanukkah halacha notes were a great example of how a child could use that technique.
I also love how clear the halachot/ Hanukkah lighting rules are from the notes. Let me know if you can figure them out from the drawings too.
Do you get it?
[…] Hanukkah I posted some drawn notes that my son did, on his own, to record what he had learned about the laws of Hanukkah. At the time I loved the idea […]