Notebooking Pages

We have been using materials from Notebooking Pages in our homeschool for the past 3 years.  Their online store has reasonable prices and a large variety of themed templates for children to use as they write about their studies.  They even offer many free resources, and several informative articles about how to get started with Notebooking.

We began notebooking when one of my sons commented that he couldn’t remember a lot of what we had done during the school year.  He felt like the whole year had passed him by and he didn’t have much to show for it.  The next year, each child began a notebook where they could store coloring pages, compositions, maps, reading lists, photos of hands on projects, brochures from field trips and samples of their best work.

They enjoy adding pages to their notebooks, and at the end of the year we have a good record of how we spent our time.  Notebooking Pages has been a big help in this endeavor, as they have done a lot of the work for me.  It is easy to print off the pages I need, and my children like the way the completed pages look in their notebooks.  Here are some of the pages we’ve used:

• We love their North American Birds notebooking pages, available for sale in the online store.  This set covers 97 birds with full sized coloring pages, as well as pages with a thumbnail sized image and plenty of lines for writing about the bird.  Our favorite template was the field-guide style page, which has an image of the bird, a place to write the bird’s Latin and English name, a few lines for jotting down field marks and even a blank range map for indicating where the bird lives in various seasons.  For my bird lovers these pages are a must-have.  We return to them again and again.

• My oldest son used their free timeline pages last year.  The pages are laid out well, with multiple formats available.   Some of their timeline pages say TOG at the top, so they are perfect for Tapestry of Grace users.  There are blank versions, too.  Some pages offer a single black line on which to place dates, while others leave space for writing notes or drawing pictures.  We used them in conjunction with our Homeschool in the Woods Timeline figures and they worked perfectly.

• We liked the Ancient History set for our reports about Egypt, China, Greece and Rome.  I used that set along with many of their free Bible pages, when we studied Ancient Times last year.
  
  It was a great place to record my young children’s narrations, and my older children used them for writing a paragraph or two about whatever we were studying.  It added a nice touch to their notebooks to have their writings placed on these themed pages.

• This Christmas season my middle boys are doing their copywork using some of the  free Christmas notebooking pages.   Copywork holds a little more charm when done on Christmas pages, it seems!  The boys are enjoying copying lines from Dicken’s Christmas Carol and stanzas from The Night Before Christmas on pages adorned with snowmen and holly.  Next week they’ll use some of the Nativity themed pages to copy portions of the Christmas story from the book of Luke.

• We also used their State Study set a couple of years ago when we investigated the history of our state.  My son appreciated having ready-made pages with our state flower, state seal, state map and state flag on them.  Template pages for state history, government, famous people, inventions and tourism are also included in this set.

• We haven’t used their Presidents pages yet, but I have already purchased them for the spring.  We will use that set for the next 3 years to record what we’ll be learning about all our nation’s presidents from Washington to Obama.

Notebooking Pages offers many additional templates, as well, including pages for Latin and Greek word study, Nature study, famous composers, beginning copywork and more.