More on Notebooking.

Amy asked for more about notebooking.  As far as these links that I have shared, I'm just using the freebies on each site.  I haven't purchased anything.  My youngest son is very resistant to any kind of structure, although (knock on wood) he seems to be getting over it somewhat, so I haven't been giving the kids anything but the topic.  Everything else is up to them.  The other day, I gave them the name of a person, George Washington Carver.  They wanted to know what to put on the page about him and I said "who, what, where and when", in other words, who he was, when he lived, where he lived and what he is famous for.  I want these pages to be very open ended, very much the kid's creation.  We've had to talk a little bit about quotes, documenting the source, etc., because I don't want them to get into any plagiarism.   Take a look at these notebooking pages on Pinterest and they should give you some ideas.  If your kids haven't done it before, you may want to print things out and later you may want to just give them a topic and see what they do with it.  Or not.  It depends on what you are trying to teach through the technique of notebooking.  A couple of years ago when we did it, I would read the science book we were doing and they would take a few notes, then when I was done reading, they'd do the notebooking page on what I had read about.  Now I want to focus on finding out things on their own, so I give them the topic and they can research it on the internet or they can use our books we have here at the house or we can use library books.

I'm thinking about adding challenges like giving them printables of different types of notebooking mini-books like these and getting them to make these.  I think notebooks are more fun when they have flaps to lift and little books to open to read more about the topic.  My kids have gotten into it a little bit this year and made some pop-up letters.  I hope as we go on, they will get into it more.  I think that the more I try to impose my ideas of how they should do it, the more they will resist, so I'm trying not to do to much of that. 

The pictures above are from several years ago.  I've lost my camera cord.  Again.  When I find it, I'll share some of this years notebooking pictures. 

I would like to add that whenever I assign a notebooking page, even if I give very detailed instructions, it never, ever looks the way I imagined it would look.  It looks the way the child wants it to look and other than asking about documentation, making sure it is factual, or correcting (very minimally) grammar and spelling, I leave their work alone. 

One last thing, if you are searching for notebooking, also look up lapbooking as it is similar.