As I
mentioned in my last blog post we are changing up the way we go about
homeschooling our 4 oldest daughters. When we started homeschooling 3 mths ago
we were flying by the seat of our pants. We pulled our girls out of public
school in the middle of the year and had absolutely no plan in place as to how
to go about doing this. We just knew that we wanted them home with us and that
we were determined to make it work. So we got some recommendations for
curriculum and jumped in the deep end. For the most part we LOVE our curriculum
and are keeping the same curriculum for the summer and fall school seasons.
What we are changing however is how we handle all the “stuff” that comes with the
lessons. There is just SO.MUCH.PAPER that comes with homeschooling. It is a job
all to itself to manage all the completed work for each child……..then multiply
that by the 4 kids we have currently doing school work. It was mind boggling to
keep up with it all.
I had heard of the term Notebooking going around the
homeschooling community and decided to look into it. At first I couldn’t
understand what it was all about. All I found were blank worksheets with lots
of empty boxes and lines for writing information. I couldn’t for the life of me
understand how this was supposed to make my life easier. It just seemed like a
ton more work to keep up with all these extra sheets of paper. People however
kept talking about it so I looked into it again. Suddenly it just clicked for
me. We are a pretty artistic family and we love to do hands on things like
crafts, scrapbooks, etc. Once I started to figure out what notebooking was all
about, basically a scrapbook for your completed work, I was sold.
I however
didn’t want to use binders or regular lined notebooks for this. Binders have the habit of getting warped in
our family and notebooks get used for art paper and leave no clean paper for
actual work. I wanted something that was durable and would stand up to the kids
handling as well as be a clear “off limits” to snagging the paper for other
things. I found this tutorial about how
to make your own notebooking journals for $5 each. I was sold. I headed up to Staples and
decided to have 10 notebooks made. I found packs of multicolored cardstock and
just had them make each separate color into a notebook. The price at Staples
was about double the price at Office Max (We don’t have an Office Max near
where we live). Our notebooks ended up coming out at $10 per. Not terrible when
you figure how much binders or paper would cost for the same project. Plus these are super cute and we won’t be
tempted to disassemble them in the fall to reuse the binders.
One of the
things about notebooking that I don’t totally love is that you have to keep a
stash of blank notebook pages at the ready at all times. You don’t want to be
in the middle of a lesson and suddenly have to go look up a template and print
the pages out right that second. I was able to find this file box at the Dollar
Store for $6 and the 1.5in file organizers at Staples for $16 (yes my eyes
crossed at that amount but I was committed at that point). I spent an evening
printing out a million and one copies of several different templates and filing
them in the organizers based on the subject or age level of the template. I do
love having them all done and organized and the file box is light enough that
it can be easily moved to the kitchen table while we are working and then put
away till the next day.
The older
girls got one notebook for History, one for Science, one for Math, and one for Language
arts.
The twins each got one for their pre-k work.
So far so good, the kids seem to be enjoying
decorating the pages and getting their work arranged in the notebooks and I love
having it all in one place and organized. Plus there is the added bonus of
acting as a portfolio all on its own at the end of the year.
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