Notebooking Pages (A REVIEW)

I have this dream that one day my boys will like writing. Someday. But, for now we do notebook pages from NotebookingPages.com. With a Notebooking Pages Lifetime membership they can freely write about topics that we are studying or that interest them without the confines of a worksheet or essays. They can have the freedom they want in writing or drawing what they want.

What is notebooking exactly? It is a method used by many homeschoolers where information is written down in some way in a collection of pictures and words. Sometimes it's all words, sometimes it's all pictures. Sometimes there are special little flaps and books to include on the page. I have tried many different resources for notebooking pages over the years, and nothing has been quite as spectacular as NotebookingPages.com.

I actually already had a lifetime membership with NotebookingPages, but wanted the opportunity to try it out again, and I'm so glad I did. Since I had already used the website for a few years, and not really used it much during that time, I decided to take this as an opportunity to rekindle the notebooking fire that I hope to start in my children because I think it is a great way to get them to like writing. I decided to start from the beginning.

My reference notebooking notebook. I use this to keep all the catalogs and extra pages in as suggested by Notebookingpages.com.

NotebookingPages.com is all online, and accessible to me on any computer with internet. I can log in and download any pages I need. But, since I was starting over with this website, I decided to start with the reading. Yes, there is a lot of useful information that I missed before! I didn't realize it was more than just notebooking pages. I decided to click on the "easy start guide" to see if I could figure out how to "do" notebooking better in our homeschool. I found out that I had some homework to do before I started! As suggested, I had to get a teacher's reference notebook together. Boy did this help with organization! I feel like I have a much better handle on all the pages with that nice 3-ring binder.

After getting the 3-ring binder, it was suggested to print the catalogs so that we could find quickly any notebooking page we were looking for. I was amazed at this information. I hadn't even realized there were catalogs and tables of contents before. It is so much easier to have those on hand in the binder than to have to search through all the pages online to decide what to print. This is a wonderful way to make getting to the notebooking pages so much easier! It also doesn't seem quite as overwhelming with these reference pages. I think that was my problem before was that I just felt overwhelmed and didn't know where to start. I highly suggest reading what she has to say about notebooking and how it can change your homeschooling.

After I finished the reading, and the homework for myself it was time to get some notebooking pages done. We used some for science, nature study, holidays, and language arts. The picture up above is an example of what some of the mammals pages look like. We had the Brown Bear pages because we were learning about them, but all the other mammals would have these same pages and more with just a different animal and title pictured. There are many different layouts for each mammal.

One of our notebook sessions was outside for a little nature study. I really enjoyed the different layouts that I could print for each child. I was able to print a more blank page for my little guys, and some with lines for me and the older kids. I let them pick. That's one key thing about notebooking is that they should get the choice of which page they want to notebook on. That's one of the nice things about the reference guide. They can look at the catalog, and quickly see which page layout they'd like.

Overall I love NotebookingPages.com. It is a great resource with many different subjects of notebooking pages. You have access to thousands of pages for your use, and you don't have to download them all right away with a lifetime membership. There are a lot of great reasons why notebooking works so well including freedom to write how and what they want, more internalized knowledge of the subject being learned, and less pressure to produce the "right answer." Not to mention they make some great keepsakes because it's fun to see your child create their own page of drawings and writings. If you're wanting to get started with notebooking, and aren't sure how or why I'd suggest investing in the Lifetime membership at NotebookingPages.com.

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