Homeschool Notebook Pages {TOS Review Crew}

Homeschool Notebook Pages

When you homeschool, you’re always looking for something new to do to excite your children or capture their interest.  A new thing we’ve been trying is NotebookingPages.com.  They provide fun and engaging homeschool notebook pages that are ready for you to print and use.  As part of the TOS Crew we received a Notebooking Pages Lifetime Membership.

The site is pretty neat.  You can use pre-made homeschool notebook pages or you can design and make your own.  If you’re not familiar with what notebooking is let me give you a brief overview.  Notebooking is basically the same as keeping a journal.  But with cool graphics and designs on your pages!

The homeschool notebook pages from Notebookingpages.com are fun and help to engage the student with what they’re studying.  Whether you’re going to use the pages to help with history or science, they’re going to have fun simple designs, layouts, and ideas.  There are lots of pre-made options.  These are what I’ve been taking advantage of during our review period.  You can also design your own through the site.

We love to do notebooking or journaling during the summer months.  It keeps us doing school but also lets us go on field trips and learn while we’re doing our daily lives.  We might take a nature walk out on our bluff.  When we get back I’ll talk to the kids about what we saw and why it’s there or what it’s doing or maybe what part of the ecosystem of the habitat it has(using all those cool words for definitions later).  After we’ve verbally discussed it we break out the notebooks.  You could use a plain notebook, but using these homeschool notebook pages makes it more fun!

When they get out their homeschool notebook pages they’re going to want cool things to draw and what better than what they saw on their trip.  They’re going to write descriptions of what the topic of the picture looked like.  Then they’re going to write about what it does, where it was, etc.  Basically everything they verbally told me is going to go on this page somewhere. . . . or on the pages as sometimes my kids can take up several pages with one nature walk.  Not only are they having fun drawing and writing, but it’s cementing in their minds what they’ve learned.  Verbally teaching and writing things down are great ways of learning and helping to retain the information they’ve studied.

For our nature walks we loved the nature study notebooking pages.  They’re found under science and work wonderfully for going on walks and documenting what you saw.  You can then research to add to what you already know about the animal or plant or the weird thing you saw that you have no idea what is was!

There are lots of animal and plant/trees pages as well.  These are great for using to document specific things you saw.  So if you know you’re going to see wildflowers then you might want to print off and take the file of wildflowers with you.  Or, you can simply choose the flowers you know you’re going to see.  We have a great selection of wildflowers on our bluff so I printed off the ones I knew we had so we could work specifically on those.

We cannot wait to go to the zoo again!  One page per animal and I’m sure my kids will fill a whole binder each.  I’m thinking we’re going to have to take some pages with us just to get down animal names and notes.  Then we can do our fun complete pages when we get home.

Something I, as the mom and teacher, really like about the homeschool notebook pages is that they are portable.  All you need is the folder with your pages, some colored pencils and a writing utensil.  My kids can work on these in the van or at dance.  We can take them with us on all our adventures too!  I love school being portable  After all, that’s one of the main reasons we homeschool.

If you’d like to see how other have been using their homeschool notebook pages take a look over on the main TOS Crew blog.  We all are reviewing the same site, but with different age children and ideas you’re going to see a great variety.  You can also find NotebookingPages.com on facebook and twitter.