Simplify Your Homeschool Lessons With Notebooking (NotebookingPages.com Review)

Do your children dislike workbooks? Yes, mine do too! When I first started homeschooling my children had a strong dislike for homeschool workbooks. 

They found them so dry and boring that I knew there just had to be a better way. Luckily for me, I was drawn to the Charlotte Mason style of learning.  his method draws largely on living books and notebooking.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.

You can do notebooking with just plain lined paper and we did use just that for a while but my children really wanted something more fun to use.

That's when I discovered NotebookingPages.com and I've loved using their Lifetime Membership for years now.

What Is Notebooking?

You might be wondering just what is notebooking? I like to think of notebooking as being a little like scrapbooking combined with a journal.

When you make a scrapbook you include interesting photos and notes to help you remember all the fun you had. 

Journaling lets you dive deeper into telling a story than there is room on a worksheet to allow.

Using notebooking in your homeschool will help show you what your child has learned in their lessons.  As your child works on their notebook page you can really see what parts of the material they have made a true connection with. 

Your child chooses what are the most important facts to remember about their lesson.  They can add photos, drawings, and longer written narrations about what they have learned.

NotebookingPages.com contains a huge selection of high-quality notebooking pages to choose from.

There are many topics covered but they are basically categorized as:

• Bible/Character

• Famous People

• Fine Arts

• Geography

• History

• Holidays

• Language Arts

• Science/Nature
  

There is also a large section labeled "Any Study". These pages offer a wide range of layouts, borders, and clipart styles that are unlabeled and can be used for just any study.

How Our Family Uses NotebookingPages.com

We use pages from NotebookingPages.com in our homeschool every week. My children just love the freedom that using a notebook page instead of a worksheet gives them. They can be as artistic and detailed as they like!

Since I've had my Lifetime Membership for a long time I've gotten into the practice of printing off many generic notebook pages from the "Any Study" area. I love to have a good handful of pages on hand for my kids to use anytime they want to write or draw. I often have them use these pages for their literature narrations.

Each of the notebooking packages contains a table of contents with a small thumbnail image of all the pages available in that package. I keep this on my computer and let my kids look through it to find just the right page if they want something more specific. 

You could also print these out and keep them in a binder for your children to look through. This makes it really easy to find the page you're looking for!

One of the projects we are working on this summer is a bird study. We are mainly going to focus on the birds that live in Ontario. NotebookingPages.com has some amazing bird notebook pages! We've been using the Birds of North America pages to record what my children are learning about.

For our study, we are using a mixture of observations in our backyard, books, and some great websites all about birds. Their notebook pages help to bring all of these observations into one place.

My children are also using some of the basic notebooking pages to create topical notebooks for their personal interests. One of my daughters just loves the weather.

She's been working on creating a notebook on how tornadoes work and writing about some of the large tornado outbreaks that have happened in recent years.

While we do homeschool year round we do slow down in the summer. I like to take this time to focus on nature study and some fun units.

Our summers are very short and I really want to make the most of the nice weather while we have it. In addition to our bird study, we will be putting together nature notebooks for trees, plants, and insects we can find in our yard and parks. NotebookingPages.com has wonderful notebooking pages for these topics!

All of my children love using these notebook pages and not only my natural writers either.  Some of my children are dyslexic and find writing a little difficult they still love to use these pages.

I think that it is because they feel more freedom and control in what they are going to write about.  I also let them choose what pages they would like to use.  So if they would like a page with more drawing space that is just fine with me!

They can use their natural gifts in an age-appropriate way to share what they have learned in our studies.

I think what I love about using notebooks in our homeschool is that it really lets me see what my children think is important in life. 

I love using NotebookPages.com as my source for notebook pages because they just make it so easy for me.  It only takes me a few minutes to find just the right pages and print them for my children.