Notebooking is one way to chronicle your children’s learning adventures each year. It is similar to the idea of lapbooking in which your child creates creative and illustrative summaries of what she has learned about a particular topic.
A notebook is essentially a portfolio of your child’s work for an entire year. Your child creates the notebook pages on a regular basis to demonstrate understanding of what he is learning. For example, if you cover addition, the first Thanksgiving, and simple machines one week, your child can choose to create a page for one or each of those topics to recap what he’s learned.
Bring out the crayons, glue, scissors and other craft materials to let your child’s imagination guide how she lays out and what she includes on each notebook page. You can take photos of work she’s done during the week, print them out, and put them on the page, or find illustrative pictures of concepts she’s studying online and print them out as well. She could draw what she’s learned, and perhaps she can write a few lines about it as well, depending on her age and writing skills.
Templates for notebooking pages are also available online.
Set aside a time to do notebooking on a regular basis, say at the end of each week. What your child learned will still be fresh in his mind, and it won’t be as difficult to recall the information. Depending on your child’s grade, you might have him create a page for each topic you covered that week or just for one or two that really interested him.
Buy a two- or three-inch binder and page protectors to put the notebooking pages in. Write the date on each page so that you have a reference for when the work was completed. You don’t have to include every worksheet your child does in the notebook, but one or two exemplar pages of the topics covered can be helpful to insert for future reference.
