Dotted notebooks
Textbooks 2.0
Science textbooks are typically terrible. They’re dull, they’re (overly) technical, and so they mostly go unread.
That’s why we have kids make their own.
Behold, a DIY textbook!
In our Big Course, kids make their own textbooks.
In each of our 180 lessons, we have “quick draws” — a few focused minutes where Brandon guides the whole class through what to put into their books, and how.
Each year, your kid will fill up a whole notebook — about 240 pages! — with illustrations, diagrams, hypotheses, and terminology.
A cure for isolated information
Why do we do this?
It’s easy to stick information in your head; it’s a lot harder to grow understanding.
Real understanding is connected… but everything we learn keeps falling out of our heads. That’s why it’s important to store the most important things we learn somewhere we can find them.
As we go through our six years of science, we’ll be unveiling (sometimes shocking) connections. We’ll be hiding “Easter eggs” — some which will only become relevant years later!
As your kid takes multiple years of our classes, we invite them to refer back to their old notebooks, to guess the riddles more easily.
Questions, answered
Q: Do I need to purchase the notebooks on my own?
Yes, alas. (Once upon a time, we bought them for everyone. We did this so much Amazon concluded we were an unauthorized bookstore, and froze our account. SIGH.)
Q: Do you recommend any particular notebooks?
Anything dotted is wonderful! (You can write, you can draw, you can… graph things? Dotted notebooks do it all.)
Paperage is a brand we like, as is Leuchtturm.
Q: What if my kid hates the very idea of notebooks?
They’re optional! (Just highly recommended, and required to get into the Philosophers Clubs.)
Q: What if they need extra time to write and draw?
Many kids do. If you’re doing the recordings, you can just hit “pause”, but we also give a link to the final drawings in each lesson’s Deep Dive.