Notebooking Review

Our family loves to be able to notebook our way through our school work. You can imagine how excited we were to be chosen to review NotebookingPages.com and their Lifetime Membership!

       

When we  began our homeschooling journey I spent a great deal of time trying to decide what was the proper fit for our family. With several special needs students and a cluster of younger children on their way up the school ladder we needed hands on activities that would reinforce our learning. We very quickly learned that worksheets were not for us. There is something just so stifling about looking at a stack of worksheets to complete. It was even worse to look at a stack of worksheets that needed to be graded! 

After doing quite a bit of research and reading countless homeschooling blogs we discovered notebooking. Notebooking is simply the newfangled word for keeping an old school journal with the added twist of artwork, paper art, maps, etc. 

Our children are very artistic and have always enjoyed keeping journals and doing scrapbooking projects. Notebooking seemed to be the perfect combination of the two activities. I made a trip to a local office supply store and had them put together several notebooks from colored cardstock.  Then we were left with the task of figuring out how to fill all of those empty pages. I found several notebooking pages here and there online but it took quite a bit of time on my part to hunt down interesting  pages that were not just "more of the same". 

When we found NotebookingPages.com I was in heaven! The site is a treasure trove of notebooking pages! From plain lined pages for any activity to subject specific pages covering Bible/Character, Famous People, Fine Arts, Geography, History, Holidays, Language Arts, and Science/Nature.

 

 Our family chose to use the History and Science notebooking pages as part of our school routine. I purposely chose our curriculum for it's compatibility with notebooking and hands on projects. Each day we complete a group reading of our assigned material and then begin working on our notebooks. In order to make our day's progress smoothly I go through and print up a wide variety of pages and keep them in a binder by our school materials. 

I absolutely love that each section is divided into different areas of study and has the option of downloading the ENTIRE section in just one click! It is so tiring go through individual listings to save and then print them one at a time. I loved that I could download the entire collection in one click!

 Our family has been studying the middle ages for history this year. I found not only some fun coloring pages for the little ones to complete but also a great deal of person specific notebooking pages. 

When it is time to work on our notebooks I pull out the binder and let the children chose which pages they would like to fill out. After they have chosen which pages they want to complete we sit down with our notebooks and begin working on projects. 

Our older daughter chooses to complete written summaries of her readings while our younger children are more likely to draw pictures that remind them of what they have heard. I am very easy going when it comes to what method they take for their notebooking work. After they are finished working on their pages I ask them to narrate what they have written or drawn so that I can be sure they understand what we have been discussing. 

                               

So what did we think of NotebookingPages.com? We loved it! I am absolutely thrilled to have been given a Lifetime Membership! I am positive that we will be using this resource for many years to come. Want to know what the other Schoolhouse Review Crew members thought of NotebookingPages.com? You can click HERE or on the banner below to find out!