Notebooking is the practice of journaling while you learn using pictures, words, or both. This is an easy and engaging way to teach any subject and works extremely well in the homeschool environment. Beautiful templates, coloring tools, and a learning environment provide learners with everything they need to notebook successfully.
There are two reasons children thrive in a notebooking learning environment
- The have ownership of their work. They are designing and scripting their own learning.
- Quality templates add value into their work. The easy to manage spaces make journaling less intimidating.
Organizing a Notebooking Station
Find a wide assortment of notebooking templates. You can create them yourself, or download templates from thousands of available online notebooking templates.
Organize your templates into files or notebooks.
If you are using the traditional hanging file folder system, create folders for your templates to make them easy to locate. Some example categories would be: blank templates, countries, ancient history, floral, insects, character studies, and holidays. There are many many more categories. Simply add new templates into new folders as they are acquired.
If you chose to organize your templates into notebooks, you may want to fill a three ring binder with plastic page holders. Print of masters of each template for your child and use file dividers to organize by topic.
Organize your Art Supplies.
Create an area, bin, or holder to give your child easy access to scissors, glue, crayons, colored pencils, and markers. Replenish them a few times year to keep the supplies fresh!
Create a Journal for each child’s completed notebooking pages.
Your children will be very proud of their notebooking pages when they are complete. Validate their hard work by providing them a place to store them safely. A three ring notebook with plastic page protectors works beautifully. At the end of the school year, or when they have collected quite a collection of pages on a particular topic, you can even have the pages bound at your local office supply.
Notebooking journals are a beautiful keepsake and even make great gifts or grandparents!
Taking the time to organize your child’s notebooking templates, journal, and supplies are essential. If you treat these supplies with respect, so will they. There is something intrinsically freeing about journalling about what you are learning. It is one of the best ways to document what you are learning. Your children will grow to love their journals. Even reluctant writers can grow by first using the pages as copywork, then word and phrase collectors, and finally documenting their learning.
Notebooking is a fruitful resource and skill to add to any educational environment and works beautifully with homeschool learning.
