Notebooking-Creative Homeschool Journaling (review)

Often while homeschooling, my children learn things outside of traditional textbooks. While I can have them do reports on places we visited or things we did, there is an even better way to record what they learned using NotebookingPages.com. We recently were given a subscription to Notebooking Pages Lifetime Membership.

When my older kids were younger, their science curriculum often had them do some notebook journaling but we haven't done much since then in the way of notebooking. Mainly because I don't have the time to come up with my own notebook pages. That is where this great resource of NotebookingPages.com comes in to play! They have 1,000's of different notebooking pages and are always adding on more. If you aren't familiar with notebook journaling, think of it as scrapbooking school work. A way to creatively record what a student is learning.

The founder, Debra Reed, is a fellow homeschool mom. She wanted to come up with a way to take the "busy work" out of homeschooling and found out that narration and notebooking helped her kids learn better.
When you first log in, you'll see several categories:

• Any Study
• A-Z
• Bible/Character
• Famous People
• Fine Arts
• Geography
• History
• Holidays
• Language Arts
• Science/Nature

Then within each of these categories, they are broken down into even more specific studies. For example, you can see when I clicked on Science/Nature, I was then brought to a page that had subjects such as anatomy all the way through to plants and many other things listed in between.

 So we clicked on animals and from there were given several options to pick from. I then clicked on fish. From there you have a zipped PDF that you download with all the files.

Once you click on any of those files, you are then brought to a wide variety of notebooking pages for that specific fish (or generally speaking, subject). There are cover pages, pages with prompts to record specific information, pages that have just a picture of the subject on with lots of blank lines to write down your own thoughts, and on and on!

You can see you are also given a file for blank templates that are just generically labeled in case you wanted to study something that does not have a specific file (say clown fish). You aren't limited by what is available.

We wanted to study sharks because of the annual shark we on Discovery channel. You can see they have their own file and boy was I surprised to find how many were listed under just sharks!

Another area that was one of my favorite is the geography section. There are notebooking pages for each state as well as maps. There are also a ton of countries that have pages to journal on as well. Many of them offer prompts of things to research and record. Being that we travel a lot, even internationally, this is a section I look forward to using more. We traveled to Outer Banks during this review so I had my kids do a little notebooking on the trip (even though we were officially done school.) Since there are so many pages offered under each specific category, that gives you and your child the ability to pick and choose what pages to print.

I've also made use of the alphabet section for my preschooler. These pages have the dotted middle line for beginner writers. Olivia also used pages for writing her name, phone number, & address.

If you are new to notebooking, Debra provides tutorials as well as tips & tricks on how best to implement the notebook pages. The best part about the lifetime membership is that is it a one time fee (or you can break it up into a few payments), but then that is IT!!! Anything new that is added, there is no addition fee for. You can use this for all your children (or even future children that come along) and it won't cost you anything more. Now that my younger children are entering school age, I have no doubt we'll be using this for a long time!

Want to give it a try? Check out the several free resources  she offers to everyone!

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