How NotebookingPages.com Revolutionized our Homeschool

I’m very pleased to be sharing with you our review of the Lifetime Membership from NotebookingPages.com. This is a great addition to any curriculum to enhance children’s learning and enable them to create beautiful portfolios showcasing what they’ve learned. (I am an affiliate of NotebookingPages.com and am including affiliate links in this post.)

What is Notebooking and How Can NotebookingPages.com Help?

I like to think of notebooking as educational scrapbooking. In the same way that you make a scrapbook page to remember and celebrate the highlights of a vacation, a student can make a notebooking page to remember and celebrate the highlights of what they have learned. They choose the things they want to remember, the things they found fascinating, and the things they want to share with others. Notebooking will not show you what a student does not know but will rather celebrate what they do know.

Our homeschooling style is very literature-based. We usually read from a spine book together to introduce our topic and show how it fits with the rest of our studies, and then the kids read anywhere from 3-10 additional books at their individual levels about the topic on their own (or with me if they are pre-readers). This works for us, they love it, and I know they learn a lot this way, but a while back, I began to be concerned that they were always taking in information and never really doing anything with it.

I began hunting around to see if others had this issue and saw that many moms were either buying literature guides filled with worksheets or making their own worksheets for their kids to do. Now, I went to traditional school as a kid and, for the most part, I loved it, but the one thing I hated was when a teacher “ruined” a good book by making me analyze it. And all the worksheets I found looked like a whole bunch of that so that was a no-go.

I almost gave up but then I came across NotebookingPages.com which does an amazing job explaining what notebooking is and how it can work with your homeschooling style and includes thousands of starter pages and templates. I took advantage of their generous freebies and tutorials and knew within a short time that I wanted to become a lifetime member! This was the piece our homeschool was missing! (You can check out their free sampler as well! It currently includes over 600 pages!)

A Lifetime Membership to NotebookingPages.com gives you access to all of their current and future pages, themes, and designs which can be used for any subject and any grade level.

How Do We Actually Use NotebookingPages.com?

Each week, I look at each girl’s overall workload and the topics we are covering and then assign a number of notebooking pages for the week. I might tell them to do three for social studies, or two for history and two for science, or just ask for a total of five from any subject. Each week varies. And I’m usually up for negotiating if they’d rather do one about something other than what I’ve assigned.

What my girls love the most about NotebookingPages.com is the freedom it gives them. They love the massive variety of choices available to them on the site. I followed the suggestion given in the tutorials to print out the catalogs of the sets I have downloaded to make a catalog for them to look through and decide what they want to do. So when they are ready to make a page, they pull out the notebook and decide which border and page design they want and then find it in my downloads. It’s a little complicated at first, but once we got our system in place, they’ve been quite independent.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been working hard to finish up our study of children around the world so almost all of our pages have been on that topic. I love watching the girls create and get things “just so.”

I also love when the younger siblings want to watch and I hear spontaneous conversations about what the older one has been learning! Invariably, the younger one asks questions and the older one either answers or pulls out a book to find out. I love it!!!

We have also done a few for science. The third grader has been unhappy with the workbook that came with our science curriculum this year, but that was completely turned around when she found the 3-D minibook system on NotebookingPages.com! She was able to figure out how to use the minibooks from this site to do the work she was being asked to do in her workbook and has just been pasting the minibooks right into the workbook. I’m happy; she’s happy. Thank you, NotebookingPages.com! 🙂

While the girls love the variety, I think my favorite thing about NotebookingPages.com and the way it has revolutionized our homeschool is that my girls are now always so keen to share with others what they have been learning and they actually have an answer when people ask them what they are doing in school! They are so quick to pull out the latest notebooking pages they have created and tell the questioner all the fascinating things they have learned!

On that note, they both really wanted to show you and tell you about some of their recent pages, so I’ll end our review with a couple of videos! Enjoy!

Connect with NotebookingPages.com

You can find NotebookingPages.com on social media:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debrareed.notebookingpages/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NotebookingPgs  @NotebookingPgs

Or if you’re ready to give them a try, head right on over to the website! I can’t imagine that you’ll be sorry!