We do lots of notebooking here, this means I've spent hours scouring the internet for pages that would work for us or having to design them. Thankfully that part of my life is over now we've been given a Notebooking Pages Lifetime Membership for NotebookingPages.com to review.
Notebooking is an amazing way to cut out the busy work and really improve your learning, it's flexible, creative and is an excellent way for journaling your students work. Notebooking can be used to assist hand writing, copywork, vocab or spelling lessons, map work, history, grammar, project work, unit studies and more. It can be used for all topics and fits in with many learning styles and most curriculum.
NotebookingPages.com was created by Debra Reed, a homeschool Mum of ten, she has designed vast array of notebooking pages for your use. There are thousands of topics to choose from and they are divided into subjects for ease of navigation, these include;
- Any Study (generic pages, mini-books and 3D pages)
- A-Z (alphabet copy work, A-Z animals, A-Z sports, A-Z transportation)
- Bible/character
- Famous People
- Fine Arts
- Geography
- History
- Holidays
- Language Arts
- Science/Nature
Debra's pages are well thought out, she seems to have thought of everything - some are plain, others include spaces to draw in or stick pictures in, some have beautiful images for the child to colour in, still more have fill in the blank spaces and more.
We downloaded some work from her artist study of Georgia O'Keeffe to go along with our current art studies
and also from her Plant and Tree study for our nature and botany work,
both were enjoyed by all the girls, they fitted easily into our existing studies and were simple to use.
I was very impressed by both the range available and the quality. I loved that she had created an easy start guide and tutorials to help those who haven't notebooked before. I received a number of emailed tips and video links when I first signed up which were very useful.
My favourite aspect by far was that all the work was done for me, I no longer have to trawl various sites to try and find something suitable - its all in one place, there is a massive variety to choose from and it only takes seconds to download. You just need to pick and choose what page layout and style will work best for your students.
Debra has even added lapbook templates including mini layered books, matchbook books, popup book, top tab books and bordered templates, which you can use to make your own lapbooks.
The lifetime membership is available for $97 which full you full access to all the notebooking pages and any new ones that are added. She even has some free resources for you to try so you can see how it works for your family.
You can see what my crew mates thought over at the TOS Blog.
Lilly is feeling a little contemplative this week and came up with a great poem.
When people map the cities, we are the size of pinpricks
When people map our world, our cities are the size of pinpricks
When people map our galaxy, the planets are pinpricks
When people map our universe, the galaxies are pinpricks
The universe is ever expanding - so how big will we end up?
Our latest activity day was based on aviation.
We explored why paper planes fly and how to make the best plane.
Looked at and made box kites,
explored space ships and made stomp rockets,
played on a flight simulator
and looked at Bernoulli's theory of aerodynamics.
My girls favourite activity by far was making paper helicopters.
They rounded off the day by making hot air balloons in the afternoon.
We've spent some time looking at the different bodies in space
the girls made posters depicting the differences (if it involves glitter I can guarantee happy girls)
and Tulip made up a skit to help her remember (sorry my computer is having a funny half hour and can't seem to turn the video round the right way).
This is something I am emailed about a lot.
To be honest it mostly comes down to planning (hence our set school times) and making sure that each child gets some one on one time for the topic they are struggling with. For example - I might be working one on one with Rose on her letter and phonetic reading while the older two (Lilly and Sunflower) are researching and writing up some history work and Tulip is doing copy work. Or while Lilly is working on a new math topic, Sunflower and Tulip will be working on their geography maps while Rose does letter tracing.
I also rely on the girls teaching each other - this is a good way for the older girls to prove they understand a topic by sharing their knowledge with one of their sisters (and a nice way of freeing me up for some one on one time where needed)
The other lifesaver for me is joint lessons - where possible I use joint lessons so all the girls will sit together to discuss, read and narrate then be sent off to do some individual work/research based on what we've just learnt - science, history, geography and even math all lend themselves to this format in our house.
Science is a easy example - when I did the life cycle of stars presentation we all sat together,
did the activity together, discussed it together, then they split off to do some individual work on it which consisted of the older girls writing (in their own words) in their science journals and the younger ones working with the 3 part cards, stamps and star crafts.
Or when we did the human body, after the activity Lilly and Sunflower drew and labelled diagrams while Tulip did a body system puzzle.
History usually involves reading about it together, individual narration (they either tell me in their own words what we've just read or answer questions on what we studied) and then, depending on age, write it up or do a craft/draw a picture.
Geography also works well as a joint lesson - we study the country together then they split with the older girls doing some more research about life in that country while the younger ones trace a map of the country or draw the flag etc.
Math is a great example - when we studied square numbers together the oldest 3 each drew diagrams or suck square stickers to represent them while Rose went off to the kitchen and used Shreddies (a square shaped breakfast cereal) to match the square numbers.
The joy of joint lessons for me is the way they all grasp the knowledge better when working together - Rose was 3 1/2 when we did the life cycle of a star lesson but she wanted to know more about it than her bigger sisters did and we ended up reading star and space books to her for weeks.
We had a lovely day yesterday at our local Home Ed group. It was a space themed event so they made constellation viewers
and I did a play doh life cycle of a star (again)
but the real highlight was in the afternoon when the mobile planetarium came - I don't know what excited them more - the inflatable dome with the crawling tunnel or the fact the the 'night sky' inside moved : )
The older two girls have been working on constellations this week - both the myths and the groupings. They have used various methods to learn the common ones including pin punching and tracing but their favourite by far hs been using star stickers to map them. (inspired by this)
Today the girls had a great little activity to show the formation of a protostar and it's development into a star.
I started the presentation with a discussion about how everything in the world (and space!) is made from atoms, then I showed 4 small balls of play doh and said they represented some atoms of hydrogen floating in space, gravity pulls these atoms together
the girls then made loads more 'hydrogen atoms' and I used gravity to again pull these atoms into my original creating a protostar. We discussed how a protostar is not a star as it produces no heat or light (great little language exercise - guess what the word protostar means - proto meaning first, earliest form of)
Next I talked about when it gets big enough the gravity and pressure causes some of the original hydrogen atoms to change into something else. I ripped the ball in half (much to their dismay) and pulled out my original 4 balls of playdoh and swapped them for a larger ball in a different colour and explained that this was now helium, when the helium atoms form a small bit of hydrogen gets left over and this left over bit is the fuel that the protostart burns to create light and heat thus turning it into a star. (we did go abit more in depth with terms like stellar nucleosynthesis and nebula but only the older ones picked up on it)
we looked at the life cycle of a star chart from Counting Coconuts and added our protostar step in. The girls then took it in turns to narrate and act out the presentation.
They finished by the younger girls playing star play doh, star pegging basket and star imprinting (again using the play doh) while the older girls did their write up and then used some great 3 part cards from Montessori Print Shop.
This was really simple to put together. I started with a rectangle of black felt (190cm x 45cm) and loads of felt remnant's and fat quarters - it cost me less than £10 to buy the black felt and the additional fat quarters I needed.
I started by drawing & cutting 2 circles for each planet from felt and 1 circle from wadding - sizes were: Mercury 2.5cm, Venus 4cm, Earth 4.5cm, moon 1.5cm, mars 2.5cm, Jupiter 21cm, Saturn 16cm, Uranus 14cm, Neptune 13cm - I made these measurements up as I was eyeballing a photo in a Montessori book to judge the sizes, I personally think the Moon, Neptune and Uranus ended up too big but I wasn't about to start all over - it does what I intended by giving them an idea of the relative sizes so if you want to change any of the dimensions feel free : )
I sewed the planets together and then glued embellishments to them (was bored of sewing by this time LOL)
Next I moved onto the Sun - again I eyeballed the picture and tried to create the edge of a circle to show them its immense size in relation to everything else. I stitched the wadding and yellow felt directly to the black felt.
I was going to use velcro dots to mark the positions of the planets but managed to misplace them, It turned out the girls had a general idea of positioning already so they weren't essential.
They did decide however, that the asteroid belt was essential so I gave them some scissors, glue, felt bits and a black arch of felt. They worked for ages so I didn't have the heart to tell them that their asteroids were too big (some are bigger than the moon!) and in reality they are small rocks and dust.
The name labels are handwritten and laminated, I store all the planets and labels in a plastic wallet (so I can easily add other information cards at a later stage) and rolled up the mat.
Would I have done anything differently - yes I would have used double the black felt and folded in half with some wadding in between so it made a nice padded base and would probably have sewn a pocket on the back for the planets etc, but that's in a dream world where I have more time to make things :)
