notebooking Archives - Growing In Grace

Notebooking the Lapbook Way

December 4, 2013Tracy

We’re doing a lot of notebooking this year. I love so much about lapbooking, but in the end, the space it takes was a real deal-killer this year. I am all about concise, confined homeschool. Besides, there’s the fact that my kids still pull out their notebooks from 2 years ago to show people, while the lapbooks stay untouched on the shelf. So, back to notebooking it is.

But I am trying to keep the spirit of lapbooking in mind. We are using, in a sense, a notebooking-hybrid.

Our notebooking pages this year are filled with pockets and mini-books, flaps and folds.

Some of our creativity is out of the pure of joy of creating, while some of it is born of necessity. For instance, our Story of the World activities include a lot of puppets and finger puppets. The kids love these and always opt to do the puppet-project if there is one. Storing all of those pieces takes a little creativity.

A super fun and effective way to “notebook” our finger puppets is to trace the kids hands, have them decorate their hand, then I cut the “finger” lines with an exacto, and we slip the puppets over the paper fingers. Too cute!

For us, it makes our memories easier to take with us and easier to share with others. (Plus, it helps me keep all the parts and pieces in one place.)

Note: Many of our lapbooking/notebooking elements are courtesy of the free downloads from Dynamic2Moms website. Check out their vast collection of resources for history.

Notebooking Suffixes

April 3, 2013Tracy

I scoured the internet looking for notebooking pages to help Oldest with adding suffixes to root words. In the end, it probably would have been faster to just make my own, especially since that’s what I ended up having to do anyway.

We’ve been learning how to add suffixes to root words, which has not come easily for Oldest. And though this helped to enforce his lesson, we’re far from finished learning this.

Click on the image to download the printable.

After cutting out our mini-books to go on our notebooking page, I worked with him to make new words from the word bank that followed the rules on his mini-books. He added those example words to the inside of the mini-books. Then, he had fun glueing his mini-books to the page.

It was nice to get away from the work sheets for a little while and review this a little differently.

What other fun ideas do you have for teaching this concept?

Notebooking Egypt

October 31, 2012Tracy

Last year was our first year to delve into notebooking with our geography study. But this year, I feel like I’m really embracing the process—adding more lapbooking elements, letting the kids create, and weaning ourselves from pre-made pages.

The result has been beautiful, in every sense. My son has really taken ownership of the process, letting me know what he’d like to do. I still have narration elements for some of the more complicated ideas that I want him to remember. But overall, he learns, he creates, he remembers.

Two of my favorites lately have been his Pharaoh page, which he completed shortly after our double-crown craft, and “The 10 Plagues” that included a flip book he colored and cut out (totally his idea, I just folded the paper to help him cut it out evenly).

And I will add that I am now a huge fan of colored paper for notebooking.

The life of an amphibian

July 25, 2012Tracy

We’ve made it to amphibians in our summer study of animals and their classifications. Because we spent quite a bit of time last summer on frogs and toads, I hadn’t intended to spend a lot of time on it this summer. But it’s always fun to study tadpoles and polliwogs.

So I picked up a book at our library, printed off some notebooking pages, and sat down with some cool science goodies that my mom sent us a few weeks ago.

First, I read the book to them while they held up the piece that matched the story. Then, I let them look through the book and play with each piece of the frog’s life cycle.

amphibian life cycle lesson for preK and K5

After the kids had touched, held, and played with the pieces for awhile, I pulled out our notebooking page. They studied each stage and then drew it in the boxes of their notebooking sheet. Most of the “art” was pretty easy.

Egg: draw a circle and color a dot in the center; for a spawn, draw several eggs with sides touching.

Tadpole: draw a circle; draw a tale; add a face

With back legs: draw a circle and tale; add back legs and a face

Front and back legs: draw a circle and tale; add back legs, front legs, and a face

Frog: (this is where it got more difficult)

Both of them bawked when I suggested drawing a frog. So we got out our I Can Draw Animals book, turned to the frog page, and drew two very cute frogs!

Notebooking for younger children

But even after the lesson was over, it wasn’t really over. Middlest had all sorts of imaginary adventures for the little frog family; and every time I get them put away, they show up somewhere else.

Littlest love — Even Littlest had a frog to love

Disclaimer: This post contains a link to my consultant site for Usborne books.

Concluding our World Tour

July 24, 2012Tracy1 Comment

Our geography is finally coming to a conclusion. We got really derailed with the arrival of Littlest, which took us much further into the summer than what I expected. But it’s been a fun journey, and no one has complained that our tour has taken a few extra months.

We just wrapped up South America with a study of Peru, Brazil, and the rainforest. Expedition Earth has a fantastic rainforest diorama to construct, but it was just a little bit more than what I’m capable of tackling right now: deconstructing and organizing the school room, preparing next year’s plans, trying to salvage my milk supply for Littlest, plus the “normal” every day that Life throws at ya’.

So, I opted for this rainforest app from Britannica.

We’ve had a ton of fun with this app. It comes with lots of games and puzzles that feature animals of the rainforest. There are also tons of articles about the rainforest and its plants and animals. Another big favorite were all the photos and videos of the rainforest.

Then we let the kids watch an episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive that featured a couple of guys lost in the Amazon rainforest.

The kids also learned the different layers of the rainforest: emergent layer, canopy, understory, and forest floor. It would have made a terrific notebooking page, but I tell you, I’m just having trouble getting to everything right now. So we studied from our app and a few pictures. Maybe another day we’ll be able to make our diorama and notebooking page.

Finally we turned our binders into bound books. Since my pro-click binding is editable, I can add the last pages once they are completed. (But I needed the kids binders to get ready for next year, so this helped free up some space.)

North America is our last continent. We’ll cover Canada and Mexico. Then, conveniently, our church is putting on a music camp and performing a musical about America. It will segue perfectly into the tail end of our tour. It’s been a fun and memorable journey. Nobody’s asked me, but our geography study was definitely the favorite part of MY school year!

Notebooking Fine Art

July 17, 2012Tracy2 Comments

I’ve been adding some lapbooking elements to our notebooking pages. It was exciting to see how much it spiced up just a plain piece of cardstock.

The main elements are from Confessions of a Homeschooler’s artist study, but I also added my own element from Homeschool Share’s free editable lapbooking templates (subscribe to their blog and get the templates for FREE!). I’ve mentioned how much I liked the “how to spot” information in the book Monet and the Impressionists for kids. So, I took the information from “how to spot a Monet” and “how to spot a Renoir” and typed it into this lapbooking template.

Oldest helped cut, Middlest helped paste, and they both had a blast working the artist puzzles.

I was thrilled to see how much my son remembered from last year’s Van Gogh study, even remembering the names to some of the art pieces, like the Potato Eaters. They especially enjoyed that piece, and I think both of them will forever remember Van Gogh and his “potato eaters.” For one, it’s such a great piece of art to bring up at the dinner table when someone complains about eating potatoes.

First Summer Science Lesson

June 11, 2012Tracy

While working for A Beka Book, I met a science teacher who was helping us with some science texts: she wrote, and I edited. And, of course, being women and mothers and all, we chatted. A comment she made during one of our chats stuck with me for years. It was an insignificant remark really, one of those comments that slips into a conversation virtually unnoticed but then never leaves you. She just happened to mention that she taught her five year old son the correct animal classifications. He knew, for instance, that a whale was a mammal, not a fish.

“How much harder is it to teach him the right information?” she stated very simply.

My son was barely two at the time, but I was left in awe at the fact that a five year old could learn about mammals vs. fish. I put her theory to the test this last year, and both my kids learned about mammals, fish, reptiles, birds, amphibians, and arthropods as we ventured through our geography study and learned of animals from other countries.

This summer, I wanted to extend those lessons to our backyard and expand on our information just a bit. Nothing too intense—a read-aloud and nature study format rather than a formal study. A friend loaned me her copy of Answers in Genesis’ World of Animals textbook, which we are using as a read-aloud. And I tried it out the other day on our first day of summer science.

Lesson 1: vertebrates and invertebrates.

I read the page and a half of text while waiting for my breakfast to finish toasting (the kids had eaten earlier while I was feeding the baby). As I slathered home-made apple butter on my toast, we discussed vertebrates and invertebrates. I had them feel each other’s backbones, and we talked about which creatures had backbones and which didn’t. Then, I named different creatures while they shouted out either vertebrate or invertebrate. We did this a number of times; then, I called out vertebrate or invertebrate, and they shouted out a creature.

Finally, I sent them on their assignment: go outside and find one vertebrate and one invertebrate, then come back in and tell me about it. I ate my breakfast in silence while they roamed the yard. A few minutes later, they burst into the house with their answers—a squirrel and a bee.

The nature study books were thrown open and the coloring pencils busily sketched their lesson. I even pulled out my Usborne I Can Draw Animals for a quick lesson on how to draw a bee.

A fun first summer science lesson, and all before I’d eaten breakfast!

Disclaimer: I am a consultant for Usborne books because they are a mainstay for our homeschool. Find out how you can get free/discounted Usborne books for your home library.