Using the notebooking method is probably the easiest way to “do” history I’ve ever found. We just started a mini history study using God King, a Story in the days of King Hezekiah, by Joanne Williamson. The book can be found at either www.veritaspress.com or www.christianbookdistributors.com. We’ve been studying ancient Egypt all year and this book is a great historical fiction to compliment the study. God King follows Taharka, who is mentioned in actual Egyptian writings as either a Pharoah or the close relative to a pharoah depending on which history source you read. His adventures center around meeting an advisor to the Hebrew king, Hezekiah.

I read the book aloud and keep a piece of 4×11 paper close at hand as my notepad/bookmarker. The only real prep work I did was to print out a map of the Egypt – Israel area. Knowledge Quest has a great CD full of blank black line maps from all time periods: http://knowledgequestmaps.com/maps.htm

As we read our daily chapter or two, I jot down people, places, events, vocabulary words, customs, etc that we’re going to follow up on later. For example, the first chapter mentions the main character came from the land of Kush, traveled the Zambesi river and was living in Napata. After our reading was done we pulled out our blank map and a Bible atlas of ancient lands to locate the places I’d written down and mark them on our map. If you like to do web research, check out this link for a one page history of Napata: http://lexicorient.com/e.o/napata.htm. We colored the map, wrote the names of the cities and rivers and then stored it in a pocket folder along with the book until tomorrow. We keep everything together in the folder until the unit is complete then we’ll store it all in our notebook. Because we use one notebook for all subjects at this stage (4th grade) it’s easier to find the papers we’re currently working on if they are in their own temporary folder.

The beauty of notebooking is it can be customized to teach all ages at once. A younger child can simply color the Nile, the Zambesi and the Red Sea in blue and the surrounding desert brown. Older children can be assigned to look up the web page about Napata and write a short history of the city to go with their map.

The next day after reading we looked up Taharka and Shabataka at www.touregypt.net under their ancient history- Pharaohs section. This is a great website for all things Egyptian. We wrote a short biography based on the web page and discussed how hard it is to know the truth of what happened over 2500 years ago because ancient records differ. At this point you could move off into a discussion of why the Bible is our only inerrant source of truth, or you could look up several resources and do a compare and contrast chart on the information found about the two men. Another great blessing of using the notebooking method is to be able to follow your children’s interests, and go off on a rabbit trail.

We’ll continue through the book this way, adding locations to our map as they are mentioned, looking up the difficult words to use for our spelling and vocabulary practice. You can download Heart of Wisdom’s people and event pages to use. Check their teachers helps page for lots of great worksheets and more: http://www.heartofwisdom.com/helps.html. You can create a timeline of events, write your own story about one of the characters, download and use clip art of Egyptian gods, create a character profile of the main character and note how he grows and matures through the experiences he has, and you could do written narration of the chapter. Your notebook pages can be all drawings and clip art and creative design with minimal text or they can be all charts and maps and timelines, or they can be primarily written words. It depends on what works best for your child or what skills they need to improve.

We created a board game that traced the chronology of the story, with trivia questions based on events in the story. We also did a mini book about some of the gods of ancient Egypt. Here’s what the mini book looks like:

We’re in chapter 16 where it mentions an event found in the Bible. We’re going to look up the Bible version in 2 Kings 20 and do a notebook page on the Assyrian attack on Judah next.

The flexibility and options with notebooking are almost limitless. The is a quick, fun, very effective way to study any time period.