Have you heard the terms notebooking and lapbooking in reference to homeschooling?
Notebooking is basically creating a journal through your child’s school experience. Anything can go in a notebook, but it is generally built with narrations, timelines, notes from a reading, and less about filling it with worksheets. Visit this link for more info.
Lapbooking is the idea of creating small books that are then placed into one larger book and used as a means to solidify a concept and create an easy review tool. Visit this link for more info.
We use both concepts in our school time, especially during our history, social studies, and science group times. There are several tools we use to make the process easy for everyone involved:
(By the way, the photos below are affiliate links. Click on them to visit Amazon and easily order these supplies for notebooking and lapbooking in your homeschool.)
1) 1″ Clear View Binder – We use TONS of these! The 1″ size is perfect for the kids, and the clear view covers make it easy to label and relabel as our lessons change.
2) Three Hole Punch – We are constantly printing pages and creating items to insert, and we hole punch everything. Going with a high quality hole punch makes all the difference!
3) 11″ by 17″ Cardstock – I will admit, I trained as a teacher and I want our classroom to look neat and tidy. I can’t handle the look of using a manila folder to create a lapbook. I order a set of large cardstock and we fold it in half. We then will tie all the books together when we finish a book or study to create an easy review tool.
4) Glue Sticks – We use glue sticks all the time! We don’t use liquid glue, since the youngest member of our school is 5, and liquid glue is just messy! Also….make sure to get washable glue sticks. I found the base of one in our washer last week when I did laundry!
5) Twistable Crayons – We keep a bucket of crayons in the middle of our table during group time. The Twistable Crayons are perfect for us, as the kids are able to adjust their crayons while we are in the middle of a lesson. It simply makes things easier on all of us.
6) Mechanical Pencils – We also have a cup of pencils on the shelf next to our table, and I keep it full so a new pencil can easily be grabbed in the middle of what we are working on.
7) Clipboards – We don’t just to school at the table. We might take a couple pages with us on a field trip for drawing, or simply bring our work into the living room to work together on the sofa. Clipboards help us be mobile.
8) Good Scissors – We are always cutting something out to glue into a lapbook or some other addition to our notebook pages. Good scissors are a must….now if I could just make sure they stay in the schoolroom!
8) Plastic Dividers – Each child generally keeps their science, geography, and history pages all in the same notebook during the school year. With the plastic dividers, the kids can quickly turn to the right spot and put their own pages away. Plastic dividers have also proven to be much more durable and long lasting in our homeschool.
9) Sharpies – We use permanent markers to label our notebooks and dividers. The ink is bold, clear, and sticks well to the plastic binders and dividers. We’ve also realized that it takes about a year for the sharpie to wear off the notebook or divider when we use them frequently. This works perfectly, as we can reuse the items again the next year.
10) Cardstock – When we are making a project to insert into their notebooks, we frequently use cardstock as the base for our project, simply for the durability it provides.
Notebooking and Lapbooking have been a huge advantage to our homeschool. This was especially true over the last two years as we renovated a home and then relocated two states away. We had several interruptions as we worked through several levels of science and history, and the notebooks and lapbooks helped us spend a day or two on review, and then we could pick right up where we left off and move on. I’ve been very happy to discover this method of learning for our home.
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This post is a part of a series on the iHomeschool Network. Visit the post to see more everyday tools moms use for their homeschools!