This is our second year of homeschool and we still love notebooking because when we first started, we knew we didn't weren't able to buy the boxed curriculum for 3 children and then 5 children the follow year. So, we were set out to look for another approach resulting in notebooking. We also have done lapbooks as well, but find ourselves ending up doing more notebooking throughout the year.
So, over the summer as I planned for our homeschooling for the 2012-2013 year, deciding it would cool to do a huge unit study of the world. We decided to go with the most common theme of "Around the World." Our total History/Geography studies are going to be based around this theme. We'll be doing notebooking for The Fifty States and Lapbooking for the other Continents.
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| United States Map |
We'll still use our workbox system because this will allow them to have structure as well as design their binders as they progress throughout the year. This teaches them so many things that the list is to long to list here, but I do recommend getting the Sue Patrick book to learn more about the workbox system, or by clicking here to learn how we use the workbox system.
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| Our Workbox System |
With notebooking you definitely want to have many options available for your children to write. I have found that color pencils work great for my children. We also have recycled our cheese dip containers by using them as our pencil, pen, crayon, and marker, holders. Below is our pencil holder, all you need is the cheese whiz container, construction paper fitted for the container, and glue. You simply glue the construction paper to the container, decorate, and fill it with your writing materials.
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| Add caption |
Last year we didn't do many unit studies because I wasn't very familiar with them yet. While planning over the summer, I've learned that these are done as a group, not individually. This was a lot such a relief because I thought it was a bit much for one person to handle. I have seen a few of them being a week long, but those not so great days made it difficult to complete them. With our first one we got from Amanda Bennett, it's a month long. We started off with the "Oceans Unit Study." This works great because it's not so much in one day and it leaves room for me to add in more learning for the areas my children need a little more.
Notebooking Success helped me understand what notebooking is and how to do it. With some much available for notebooking, it was hard to utilize it in our homeschooling, but this eBook is notebooking guide for every grade level and walks you through any questions I had about notebooking. It also connected me to dozens of free notebooking pages.
Debra Reeds notebooking program is a great resource when it comes to notebooking because every time I'm looking for notebooking pages, I can find what I'm looking for here. She now has the Notebooking publisher, which is by far the best. This is works well for my fifth grader because he's the type that has a lot of thoughts and tends to skips words as he writes. So, he can type his thoughts into word and copy and paste them into the notebooking page through the publisher. He also doesn't like to draw, so this will allow him to find a picture, save it to the computer, and then upload it to his notebooking page. Often times, he will do more than the recommended pages for the day, by using the Notebooking Publisher.
Use discount code = discount10 to save $10 on your $20+ purchase at NotebookingPages.com
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| Our Nature Walk |
I have posted this before with our nature walk and notebooking. This is my 4 year old drawing what he saw during the nature walk. Notebooking is simply a reflection of what your child interprets from reading about the topic that was chosen, but for your older children, you want to ask them specific questions to guide them to pull out the main ideas, and more.
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