Written Narration W Notebooking Pages

OK, got it. That makes much sense to me now. Thank you!  So for her composition books, your daughter has books for history, lit, Bible, with separate resources for her Book of Centuries and commonplace book.  So where are the current events, personal development, geography notes being written? Sorry to be so nit-picky, but the paper trail gets out of hand so quickly, as I’m sure you all know. 

And did anyone happen to notice some of the ridiculous typos in my previous post?? The highlight (which I can no longer edit to correct) is that apparently my hypothetical child in the example is reading Ancient Egypt and Her Motherhood. Now that, my friends, is some compelling reading. Aren’t you all jealous and wish your children were reading such gems? lol  

Yikes. Scary stuff, that auto-correct. 

Too funny about your typo story! The computer-generated transcriptions of my voicemails can get pretty weird like that sometimes too. lol

Thank you so much for the added explanations on the notebooks. I think I’ve totally got it now. I really like the idea of doing that 7-12th, for many reasons. (And I love composition notebooks, which doesn’t hurt either).

Now I need to back and explore that 1st-6th link you shared, although I’m curious what you do with yours in that range since you indicated that you don’t do that. I’m guessing lots of proclick? 🙂

@missceegee: perhaps it is time for you to make a video of how you use comp. books…just sayin’!  We have totally revamped how we do things around here thanks to your help!

It’s too simple to video really. My kids each have their own desk/shelf space so their stuff is separate, but if we shared shelf space, I would either buy one color per kid and simply label them accordingly. You could also label spines with a silver sharpie. Or do both.

My younger kids end up with a pro-click portfolio at years end, but we don’t put a lot in them bc they don’t do a lot of written work. I just didn’t want big binders. I like the method described but not the binders.

Remind me where to find composition books with graph paper large enough for a sloppy 14yo mathematician.  He’s been using notebook paper for math.  At times he’s used loose graph paper.  I hadn’t thought to use composition books with graph paper.  This will be a huge help….I’m hoping. 

What a wonderful way to keep a continuous “picture” of a child’s work.  It seems so obvious reading this thread but it never occured to me before now.  I’ve always used a notebook for our Science and Nature Study but otherwise I’ve used loose papers that I then file by subject …. and truthfully they’re never seen again.  The idea of filing them was to review them, myself or together with the kids, but that has rarely happened. 

I wonder what a neat way to capture all those loose pages would be?  Other than a folder with 3 hole punches …. there must be something more fun or creative?! 

I realize, while I’m typing, that one reason I never used another system is that my children don’t consistently do a written narration from the same book.  That makes these beautiful notebooks not so fun.  The entries would be sporadic and that’s not cool.  Oh, well.  I guess I could file away the idea for next year.

We do the same as Christie. My ds14 has several comp books and only 2 binders: 1 for boc he started several years ago and 1 for Aplogia science (he writes his narrations in comp book when he reads a bio or something science related that is not from the text). Love not having so many binders but still have some that my youngest uses, but not like before.

My middle child is using more comp books, too, but has a binder, or two, for 106 Days worksheets. By 7th grade, or maybe before, we’ll only use comp books. Love them!

As far as notebooking pages, my kids just don’t thrive off them as they used to, or maybe they never did, lol. It is too much work to print, file and then remember where they were stored. My dc don’t usually color during read alouds, either. My youngest may play with Legos but my older dc like to write on dry erase boards to “hang hooks” or they just listen. Not very creative, but it beats me spending time messing with the printer or making choices for the pages and then them not happy with what they created and wanting to do it again. No way! Plus my oldest would rather me not spend time on that sort of thing. He just thinks it’s a waste, which is fine by me. And I really liked the idea of it, but it just hasn’t worked out. And I have been better about pre-printing and that still didn’t help.

The thin line version is not yet available. It is significantly different. It’s 1/2 as thick and portrait oriented. I loved my original, but found it a bit big and unwieldy. The new one is perfect in my not so humble opinion. 🙂 I made a prototype and showed it at a scm conference where it was well received and the scm team liked it. I printed a few and sold those, too. I don’t have any at the moment and I’m unsure of where scm is in their process. You can see a sample on my neglected blog.