workbox and notebooking – please define

Notebooking and Workboxes are totally different things…

Notebooking – basically doing narrations…. it is a notebook that a child writes in things that they have learned or found interesting from a reading or whatever.  Often has room to draw a picture, and to write.  Can be done with basic paper, or you can get paper that is fancy, or with themes, etc…

Workboxes – a method of organizing homeschool in a visual way.  From the official system by Sue Patrick, there are 12 plastic shoeboxes.  You put a school activity in each one, the student goes through them in order.  They can visually see how much there is to do, and how much is left.  There are LOTS of variations on the web.

i’ve done just a little bit of lapbooking, and i thought it was fun.  i always wondered what it was, so i finally started researching it.  and the best info actually came from youtube, with moms just showing examples and step by step directions.  also, depending on what you are studying, you can get free or very cheap fun little resources (cut outs, pictures, pockets, dials, all sorts of flaps & windows, etc) from various online sites.

it all starts with a manilla tab office folder, some cardstock & construction paper!  it’s fun! 

hth,

amy

Yes, that is an accurate description of lapbooking. lol  They are very detailed and often time consuming.  You can tweak them, like any thing else, to suit your family.  We use lots of notebooking pages around our house for narrations both written and drawn.  It is a good way to assess more than just knowledge of the subject – like what you need to focus on in grammar. lol  I mostly use notebooking for copywork, dictation, science, history, (all of our author, artist, composer, and other famous people studied) geography, and occasionally literature narrations.  

This is something new that I am going to try this next year.  We love to listen to books and enjoy them very much, but the amount of time spent reading aloud is hard for me.  We listen to audio books during lunch and then some more after lunch (so about an hour) everyday.  The kids tend to listen better when they are drawing or coloring.  I decided that I would get some artist sketch pads from Walmart and make that their drawn illustrations of what they hear.  This notebook is solely for our read-aloud literature.  I figure that we will have a neat book when they are done that they will enjoy looking at.  And, I won’t have all those odds-n-ends pieces of paper treasures to store forever that have no real meaning to me, other than the kids drew it.

This link will take to the site I learned about notebooking from.  She explained it, has tons of pages and once you see the pages you will see where and how you can use them.  http://notebookingpages.com/  She even has a web app coming next month where your kids can type in their narrations and design their own page and print it.

Okay, someone talk me into or out of purchasing the Notebookingpages download right now!! It is on sale for their 6th year of business and I really want it, but wondering how much I’ll really use it.

We do written/drawn narrations all the time, but I do feel as if the blank printer paper or even story paper is not quite cuttin’ it. I did just purchase my youngest ds a composition/story paper notebook that is working out good for his narrations, so it’s not that I need the notebooking pages but feel that it would help to be a bit more prepared. They all have binders with printer/lined paper in them but I think this other would be more interesting to them.

Help me decide before their sale ends!!

Thanks Sheraz. We’re super visual ourselves and, even though I have only boys, I think they would love the pages instead of the plain paper with the narrations written on separate lined paper.

Gotta help one of my boys.

Thanks so much.