CM Series - What Can We Do Once We Read A Book? Pt.III - Confident Learners Who Want to Creative

Notebooking helps to give confident learners a chance to be creative in their narrations.

If your child is a confident learner but not a fan of traditional chapter by chapter narration, how about allowing them to narrating by topic?  Notebooking is a learning tool that allows narration to take place in a standard plain notebook (in its simplest form) or on individual pieces of paper that can be kept in page protectors in a binder or duo-tang.  Pages can be designed in any number of styles providing users with writing lines, empty boxes for drawings or side notes, writing prompts, images or other decorative effects.  Pages usually focus on one topic - person, place, thing, event, or lesson.  Unlike narrating a piece of literature, narrating through a notebooking sheet allows learners to pull info and data from various sources into one entry allowing them to make connections or "leaps" on their own; narrating to the topic rather than only to a straight plot or story line. 

You will find a number of different notebooking resources on our blog and on our resource website.  We have encouraged even our very youngest child to use notebooking sheets from grade one and she has done so with much success.  Almost all of our notebooking sheets have been created out of necessity for our own children.  As their writing and narrating skills have grown, so have the complexity of our notebooking sheets.  From simple sheets with primary lines to notebook ruled line spacing, we try to include various levels to encourage all learners.  Because our children, and probably yours too, enjoy drawing, illustrating or doodling, we have been sure to leave spaces for drawing in almost all of our sets and pages.

We offer a variety of notebooking sheets in fun layouts such as a newspaper or block style, graphic organizers, and decorative and plain writing pages in topics including history, the saints, art, science and nature, faith and our ever popular Bible sets.  Our Bible notebooking sets accompany our Life of Christ Timeline for Children and are available in English or Spanish.  Each set has twelve different layout options for learners K-12.  They are also the perfect go-along for those using the Child's Bible History by F. J. Knecht 

If we are trying to encourage creativity, some may wonder why many of our sets seem to have the same styles?  That's simple.  One of our children envisioned a sort of personal encyclopedia of their work which could expanded and added to year  after year.  Having the pages look a bit uniform gives a very nice presentation in her notebook and since we generally do not make resources that we ourselves are not going to use, we have just continued on this path.  However, we do have different styles for our nature notebooking sheets and junior notebooking sheets.

Junior notebooking sheets are specially designed for younger learners who enjoy writing and would like to begin keeping a collection of their work.  These learners generally do not need coaxing to put pencil to paper and they enjoy being creative.  We have created various themed sets of these sheets as well.  Many of them will work perfectly if you are beginning to explore weather, simple science themes, fables, tales and nursery rhymes.

We hope this post inspires you to try something new in your learning days with your learner.  Be sure to search our blog for the latest posts and newly added resources for notebooking. 

Click HERE to see all of our Notebooking resources.

Blessings,

That Resource Team

Just a Quick Note:

Have a reluctant writer?  If your children can improve their drawing skills, you will almost undoubtedly find that they will want to use notebooking sheets that allow them to draw and illustrate details that can add life and meaning to their narrations.  If you are looking for a nice little resource to help teach drawing and penmanship to children K-6 while teaching about some basic topics, you may want to consider trying the Draw Write Now  series of books.  Our children really enjoyed using these books and return to them over and over to remember techniques for drawing animals, simple characters, and nature lore.