Documenting Life With Notebooking

Have you tried notebooking with your homeschool?  Over the past two months we’ve been using our Lifetime Membership from NotebookingPages.com and today we’re sharing our review of it. (Please note that there are affiliate links in this post).

What is notebooking?

I’m a paper-and-pen type of gal, and I used to love scrapbooking.  Unfortunately, since my children came along I no longer have time to scrapbook like I used to.  Notebooking is like a version of scrapbooking for kids.  They can document what they learn as they go along and create their own book of knowledge and experiences.

With 1000s of templates ready to print and go, it was so difficult to know where to start!  When we started, we tried a little of this and that before settling into one or two topics that the kids will work on over the summer before moving on to other topics.  I’ve no doubt that you’ll see these pages popping up in our blogging activities now and again.

What topics does NotebookingPages.com have?

There are soooo many topics, but they fall into these main categories:

• Famous People
• Fine Arts
• Geography
• History
• Holidays
• Language Arts
• Science/Nature
• Bible/Characteristics

How did we use NotebookingPages.com?

Country Studies

At first I had in mind for the children to do country studies.  Tristan chose Brazil in preparation for the upcoming Summer Olympics, and Kallista chose Canada as she knew that Canada Day is approaching and she wanted to explore more about my homeland.  Here Kallista is doing a little copywork of the Canadian national anthem.

There are lots of pages with various aspects of the countries culture and politics, etc. To start the kids off I printed these pages for them:

• The country title page
• Fast facts and figures
• Key locations, features and points of interest
• A flag to colour
• National holidays
• The national anthem
• Wildlife
• Science and Technology
• Inventions
• Food

Kallista thought it was lots of fun to use photos of Canadian wildlife that we took on our honeymoon (I know Phil is hairy, but no, he isn’t part of the wildlife!).

Nature

I have been learning about the birds of Northern Ireland over the past couple of years, and the children also show some interest so they began with a page to learn about the different parts of a bird. Tristan was so happy with his that he waited for our bird-watching guru neighbour to come home so he could show it off!

I want the children and I to spend more time outdoors this year and learn about our surroundings.  So I printed off some flower and weed pages and the children and I went for a walk in a nearby park.  They chose some flowers and plants that caught their attention.

They drew pictures of the plants and then looked them up to discover more information about when they bloomed, the habitats they can be found in, etc. We took a picnic lunch and had a fantastic time!  We will do more of these pages over the summer and autumn as the plants change.

Holiday scrapbook

We just came home from 8 days of camping and I made sure to take some pages with us, and it worked really well.  Each day the children tracked the weather during our trip.

Then at the end of each day the kids chose a page to record the highlights of their day.  Pages used for this were

• At the Beach
• In the Forest
• In The Sea and Ocean
• Fish & Other Water Creatures

They drew a picture, and then wrote a few lines about their experiences.  Tristan did his on his own, while Kallista would dictate what she wanted to write.  I wrote it down on a piece of paper and then she copied it onto her page.  Now that we’re home the kids can add it some brochures and photographs to really make a memorable packet.

What do I think about NotebookingPages.com?

One brilliant thing about NotebookingPages.com is that with a Lifetime Membership you can always go back and add to your notebooks as the children grow and learn more.  They’re creating a snapshot in time about their learning adventures.

You can use these pages for dictation, narration, creative writing, factual information such as biology, and there’s a choice of pages so you can have a blank page with just a border for drawings, or a full page of lines for writing, or several combinations in between.  With such variety, you’ll never grow bored of the choices.  You can even create pieces for your own lapbook – this is on my want-to-do-soon list.

I had started my own similar nature project a couple of years ago, but now the kids can continue on with much prettier pages!  Why should I recreate the wheel if I don’t have to.  For busy families, just print and go!

If you’re not sure if NotebookingPages.com is right for you, you can try out their free 600-page sampler to see what it’s all about – you can hardly go wrong with a freebie like this!

To read more reviews about NotebookingPages.com by the Schoolhouse  Review Crew, click on the graphic below and follow the instructions.  You will find 100 honest reviews by the Crew.  If you’d like to know more or would like to follow NotebookingPages.com, you can connect with them through their website, Facebook, and Twitter.