What's in YoUr Book of Centuries?

I like small images of artwork and artifacts, too.  We include clippings from magazines and copies of interesting items in books – I add extra space in a busy century with a sheet of paper cut down from the top to expose the dates and put it in between the century pages.  I also add a cut down sheet for personal or family items from a time period – genealogical info, in other words.  I like the BOC to get more and more colorful and diverse, and I am starting a geography notebook in a similar fashion.

Well, I am kind of making it up as we go along.  I printed outline maps of the continents (more or less) onto card stock to use for dividers – made some tabs and taped them on.  These we are coloring up real pretty.  I have a second page in each section that is the same outline map, but we can write in names and info when we encounter it.  Slowly it will get filled in.  When we read something about a country or region that we want to note, we make a page for it in the section of the continent it is in.  Mostly we make notes about things we read in Nat. Geographic – or cut out the article or a picture and paste it in. Or we make notes about where the action occurs in the books we read.  Or where an interesting animal lives.  Within the continent sections the pages are just put in alphabetically.   I plan to sometimes just do a “notebooking” page about a country and it could go in the notebook.  If we had a postcard or stamp or piece of writing in the local language, or an art image showing the area – or whatever.  I can think of an excuse to put almost anything in here LOL.

I think I need to add dividers for the oceans, now that I think about it.  

We have just been using this casually during the summer, but I have a book to do this year that prompted me to make this notebook as a virtual travel scrapbook, Quest for the Lost City of Gold by Steven Biesty

http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Lost-City-Stephen-Biesty/dp/B003D7JYJK

I saw a couple of printable “passports” online that I want to make as well, with a pocket for them in the notebook – fun to stamp the country when we do a page about it.

I am always thinking of notebook ideas now – Solar System notebook, Animals notebook and plants notebook – with taxonomic divisions.  Just an excuse to buy more cute binders and paper LOL.

Yes, well I have a lot of ideas, but the problem is the implementation LOL.

Here are a couple of passport links

http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/2009/05/homemade-passport.html

This one is $5 for the download.  I haven’t bought it, but I have bought some coloring murals from this site and they are very well put together, I am sure this is as well.

http://satorismiles.com/2009/04/03/pretend-passports-a-great-homeschool-tool/

This is a blog entry with some links to a free passport file from Five in a Row.  I like the pics of the passport – it looks really cute.  I will probably try the free one first.