notebooking

Notebooking Sale-a-bration

May 8, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

Y’all know I love notebooking. It inspires more critical thinking and freedom than worksheets and workbooks. We notebook in every subject; even Alex does preschool notebooking {though he isn’t fond of it yet!}

You might be asking: what is it? I answer that it can be as extravagant or as simple as you wish. It can be elegant scrapbook journals {I could only wish I had the discipline to maintain my nature journal like a Victorian lady} or a binder with printed and filled-in pages relating to a unit study. It also depends on your teaching style and the learning styles of your children. Notebooking is different with each of my kids, but it is not optional.

I recently went through some boxes looking for something and came across all of Elizabeth’s old notebooks from history and language arts. They’re so cute and organized. It inspires me to get better organized with the girls and for them to have ownership of their own notebooks rather than having to do it myself. They’re now of the age Liz was when I began with her!

Next year is the first year that Kate is mandated to be in school and I have to write a letter for her to the county. She turns 6 on Saturday and will be in 2nd grade according to our loose records.

Alex is currently blowing through 4K work and he just turned 3.

Tori is pretty on track for age 7, loving math the most. Her favorite thing is her math journal. {we call i t mathbooking!}

Liz is a voracious reader at age 12. I hope their writing will improve with notebooking. We have oral narration down pat.

I don’t think my kids would be as advanced as they are without the freedom notebooking affords. It forces them to think about what they learn rather than just regurgitate facts. {But we do a lot of memory work too!} Notebooking is great for lists and copywork too. It also encourages creativity since they can embellish as much or as little as they wish on the drawings and lapbook aspects.

Check out my notebooking posts here to see how we use it in our homeschool.

Check out my notebooking Pinterest board here.

And my favorite notebooking company is having a birthday sale! Happy Birthday!

Become a Notebooking Pages LIFETIME Member during their NotebookingPages.com 7th Birthday Sale-a-Bration Event:

Save $25 on your membership
Receive access to 150+ current notebooking products
Receive ALL future notebooking products
Receive up to two years FREE access to their notebooking (& copywork) web-app, The Notebooking Publisher™
Receive a $100 e-gift Bonus Bundle from various homeschool publishers
Earn a chance to win some great prizes … an iPad mini, $100 Amazon.com gift card, LIFETIME access to The Notebooking Publisher™, and a LIFETIME membership to MomsToolBelt.com.

FACEBOOK PARTY

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) we are having a Facebook Party.
Lots of FUN and PRIZES!
May 21st from 9-10pm ET.
Come join us here: https://www.facebook.com/events/600204473336778/

Wonder how to use notebooking?

Visit NotebookingPages.com to learn more about their memberships and their new web-app, The Notebooking Publisher™

Make custom copywork pages!

7th Birthday Sale-A-Bration Details:

Save $25 on Notebooking Pages LIFETIME Membership (two-payment plan available) ...one time payment of $74.95 or two monthly payments ($50.00/$24.95).
New members receive up to 2 Years FREE Access to The Notebooking Publisher™ … purchase by Friday, May 10th to receive 2 years FREE access
… purchase by Friday, May 17th to receive 18 months FREE access
… purchase by Friday, May 24th to receive 15 months FREE access
…purchase by Friday, May 31st to receive 12 months FREE access
All LIFETIME members (new and current) will receive a $100 Bonus E-Gift Homeschool Package from participating NotebookingPages.com Sponsors …The e-gifts will be delivered to the Member Download Center by May 31st.
All LIFETIME members (new and current) may enter a prize drawing for: *an iPad mini (1 winner) *$100 Amazon.com Gift Card (2 winners) *LIFETIME access to The Notebooking Publisher™ (3 winners) *LIFETIME membership to MomsToolBelt.com (5 winners) …details for the drawing will be found in their Member Download Center.
New (& improved) features of The Notebooking Publisher™ web-app *Copywork feature … create your own custom copywork pages (print/cursive, regular/primary). *Ability to create templates -and- save your work-in-progress to the web. *Ability to edit selected portions of text within a text frame. *Separate user accounts for mom and kids … password protection coming very soon. …new demo videos will be added to the site each week of the sale.

Don’t know where to begin with notebooking?

Check out this amazing starter guide with bonus notebooking pages.

Click here to view more details!

Click to download a NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS SAMPLE!

Filed Under: notebooking Tagged With: journal, lapbook, notebooking, scrapbook

Middle School Art

May 7, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 4 Comments

We listened to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. It was part of our classical history studies with Tapestry of Grace Year 2 and the book was on the girls’ list of reading, but we read it together as a family and was delighted and then I found the whole symphony on YouTube. It is magnificent.

Liz finally broke out her acrylics and painted this:

She loves abstract art. I love her representation of the musicians’ candles. She explained which parts of her painting meant which emotion from the symphony.

Brilliant.

Check out these great Haydn notebooking pages.

We love Notebooking Pages for all our main notebooking needs.

Use discount code = discount5 to save $5 on your $10+ purchase at NotebookingPages.com

Check out this: FAMOUS COMPOSERS SAMPLE

Interested in a comprehensive classical/Charlotte Mason history-based Christian curriculum program? This includes Bible, government, philosophy, language arts, fine arts, and social studies components: geography, history, timelines. It covers different learning levels for lower grammar {1-3}, upper grammar {4-6}, dialectic {7-8}, and rhetoric {9-12}. I can print what I need from their online system. Their reading lists are exquisite.

Filed Under: art, notebooking, Tapestry of Grace Tagged With: art, Charlotte Mason, classical, Haydn, history, notebooking, Tapestry of Grace

A Horse of a Different Color

April 29, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 6 Comments

When I think of Wizards, I immediately think of the Great Oz. The kids and I love that horse in the movie. Check out the meaning of the phrase.

Weren’t there lots of unexpected turns in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? {You can get all the books on Kindle for free!} Kate is already reading the 2nd one!

Of course, the girls and I saw the new Oz the Great and Powerful movie. Opening weekend!

Here’s our Oz sensory bin. Rainbow rice and pasta. Emerald beads in a bucket and bowtie. A wooden rainbow. Oz characters from Grandma and a lion finger puppet.

Oz preschool pack printables for Alex. The girls loved it too.

3 part matching cards. Alex is telling me they lost the match to the Cowardly Lion. sigh

We used the puppets to retell the plot and practiced the reading pages.

The kids are all coloring pages for their lapbooks!

least and most favorite characters pages.

Kate and Tori both loved Dorothy and Tori disliked the Wicked Witch. Kate said the Cowardly Lion was annoying and talked too much. ha!

map work: coloring in the state of Kansas and color coding the regions of Oz.

I really love this one!

Paying it forward. Did you know that last Thursday was The Day?

We discussed how Dorothy was so kind and generous. She could have returned home to Kansas at any time had she known how. She wasn’t resentful at all but truly pleased that she helped her friends.

Tori and Kate wrote some ways she could be kind to others. I love this Pay It Forward printable! I also love it that it has a hot air balloon!

Kate said she could give flowers, food, and toys to friends. She could help with cooking.

Tori wrote that she could bake cakes and pick flowers for neighbors and friends, help Dad in the garden, clean up, help with Alex, and doing chores without being asked.

Liz does research on Oz Wikia to compare movies to the book.

I found these awesome stickers of original illustrations! Love Dover!

I’d gotten these fun glasses around Easter. Perfect for Oz play.

The girls finish up their lapbooks and notebooking

Tori is a “cowardly” reader. I gave her “liquid courage” to help. It’s just mango juice with some sweet and sour. I would’ve added some 7Up {‘cause fizzies always help!}, but we’re all out.

Resources:

More Lapbook Printables

For fun: Movie bloopers

My OzTastic Pinterest Board:

Join us!

Facebook Page

Pinterest Board

Check out the other posts!

Enchanted Homeschooling Mom – Royal Baloo – 3 Dinosaurs – Monsters Ed – Chestnut Grove Academy – Growing in God’s Grace – Royal Little Lambs – Life with Moore Babies – Teach Beside Me – The Usual Mayhem – Mum Central – Fantastic Fun and Learning – Kathys Cluttered Mind – Play Create Explore – Toddler Approved – Growing Book by Book – Adventures in Mommydom – B-Inspired Mama – The Fairy and The Frog – Edventures with Kids – Learning & Growing the Piwi way – A Gluten Free Journey – Rainy Day Mum – Mom to Crazy Monkeys – No Doubt Learning

Link up here!

Filed Under: Poppins Book Nook Tagged With: dorothy, lapbook, notebooking, oz, preschool, rainbow, unit study, witch, wizard

Math Cards Review

March 1, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

We were all very impressed with the Target Vocabulary Pictures, Set 1 from Lone Star Learning. They are brightly colored, laminated for durability, and come with a handy dandy definition card (which I stored in a safe place!). They are high quality and well worth the $29.99 price.

These ain’t your mama’s flashcards, y’all.

These cards are versatile in the extreme. I don’t think we even touched the tip of the iceberg in all the ways we can use these cards. I look forward to getting creative and allowing my kids to have lots of fun with these over the years!

They’re for multi-age use and we prove it! My son is almost 3. My girls are 5, almost 7, and 12 years old. And I’m an adult {ahem}. We all enjoyed using these cards. The girls requested all the other sets as presents! I have no problem obliging that request.

The cards completely appeal to the visual learner. The teach math vocabulary by using a picture within the word. I am not a “math person,” by any means. These are amazingly enticing to my two highly verbal daughters and me.

Tori is the “math girl” and she really loved using these.

We used these math vocabulary cards in centers, mathbooking, and art!

I set up math centers, kind of Montessori style, on floor rugs and my kids worked on those centers for several weeks.

Here is one where Tori is placing numbers in order. The DEcreasing and INcreasing cards help her to understand this number order concept.

Then, Tori sorted EVEN and ODD numbers. Look at the little white blocks on the math cards to help visualize that concept.

Greater Than and Less Than cards with the symbols helping to spell out the words. We also use the alligator idea (he “eats” the number).

And the geometry cards were perfect for Alex to sort his 3D shapes!

Liz helps her brother match the shapes all up with the cards and they counted the sides or discussed the shapes and compared/contrasted them.

Here, Tori matches some Montessori 4-part cards and uses the fraction card to help her remember that Denominator is Down and Numerator is North. Gotta love that alliteration!

Tori fills in a little fraction book with that card to help again. She’s a perfectionist and got very frustrated with herself, second guessing and getting confused by the part=numerator and whole=denominator. She understood which was down and which was north very quickly though.

Tori plays a matching game with fractions and uses that Numerator/Denominator card again. I think she really understood the fraction concept after these activities and the mnemonic on the card! Tori narrated to me each match and which number was the numerator and which was the denominator and why.

Here is Kate working out a fraction puzzle with the Numerator/Denominator card. She got the concept really quickly. She learns very differently from Tori and doesn’t like to repeat activities once she has mastered them.

And here’s our symmetry math art project! This was loads of fun – even I did it!

Alex holds up our card teaching the concept. I gave instructions and we discussed mirror images. We looked at lovely pictures from nature earlier of symmetry in peacock spiders. Love how everything worked out for this lesson!

Liz and Tori fingerpaint on one side of their papers.

Kate concentrates to get that paint just right.

Alex paints his picture.

I folded the papers in half and carefully pulled them back apart and voilà! beautiful Rorschach-like SYMMETRY paintings!

So, we cannot praise these math cards enough! They are versatile, high quality, fun, colorful…they appeal to all my different learners – right-brained, left-brained, the visual, the numbers whiz, the verbal learners, and the kinesthetic. How cool is that in a single product?

From the site: Target Vocabulary Pictures Set 1, 2 or 3 consist of math vocabulary presented visually to facilitate recall. Target Vocabulary Pictures can be purchased in 2 sizes of brightly colored, coated cards for an easy-to-display, colorful classroom presentation. 50-56 cards in each set. $29.99 for each set

Sets are not arranged by grade level. Please view sets to determine the appropriateness for your students.

Filed Under: Montessori, Schoolhouse Review Crew Tagged With: cards, centers, math, mathbooking, notebooking

Another Math Monday

January 28, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

We had trouble last time we had word problems. The girls read them and didn’t know whether to add or subtract. So now the girls have this handy dandy chart in their math journals to help them decipher the words in context.

My SIL pinned this math symbols chart. Perfect!

I thought the girls would like this pattern activity (scroll down to box#8). I admit I lost way too much perusing her site and subsequent links and downloading all these fun mathtivities for later!

The girls loved making these Zero the Hero posters.

Princess dresses help Kate do her best during school time.

Then, we watched Schoolhouse Rock DVDs.

Filed Under: Elementary, math Tagged With: math, mathbooking, notebooking, patterns, place value

Winter Nature Walk

January 12, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 7 Comments

Join us on our walk around our neighborhood?

I love the birches in this area. Their bark really stands out…and has eyes!

an evergreen silhouette with the sun shining through it.

a tree that still has leaves on it

Just look at that gorgeous bark! I think it’s a striped maple.

crows in the tree. they were eating walnuts.

and, look! a crow footprint in the snow.

this tree already has buds on it

this birch with buds and catkins

juniper berries. Tori was good to spot these.

a really big beautiful rock in someone’s front yard

a poignant picture of unpruned withered roses with rocks

Tori was excited by how long her shadow was.

Rosehips along the next door neighbor’s fence. I love how they stand out against the gray and snow.

our new nature display box. I found this at Hobby Lobby. perfect.

the girls hard at work drawing the milkweed pods

Tori is proud of her tree silhouette page

Katie is drawing the buds and crows in her tree silhouette

Alex drew his pictures too. He loves being a part of it all.

Tools we use and love

Outdoor Hour Challenges

Winter Challenges

Notebooking Pages

Amazon.com Widgets

Sure glad we got in that walk since we’re in a blizzard this weekend!

Tori got a little rock set for Christmas and we’re going to explore that since all our rocks are under billows of snow right now.

Filed Under: art, Charlotte Mason, Elementary, Nature Study, notebooking, Preschool, Tot School Tagged With: art, drawing, nature, notebooking, rocks, snow, trees, walk, winter

Middle School is Tough

January 9, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

I need to a better job showcasing Liz and her schooling. Middle school isn’t all cute and craft-laden. It’s lots more work than what the littles do. And it doesn’t make for fun pictures.

Except when I get wide-eyed leave-me-alone stares.

Liz loves notebooking with PowerPoint and Notebooking Publisher. yay for technology!

Visit NotebookingPages.com to learn more about their memberships
and their new web-app, The Notebooking Publisher™

I snapped a pic of Liz’s DNA strand. She’s going through Apologia General Science. She does most of the experiments with Dad, so there aren’t usually any pictures since I’m not involved.

Liz is enjoying Tapestry of Grace. We’ll learn about her namesake Elizabeth I next week!

She continues to adore Life of Fred math. She is now on Elementary Physics, a pre-algebra book.

Some of Liz’s favorite things…

Her aStore

Filed Under: Charlotte Mason, Classical, daughters, history, math, Middle School, notebooking, science, Tapestry of Grace, technology Tagged With: Apologia, Charlotte Mason, classical, daughter, math, middle school, notebooking, science, technology

Math Monday

January 7, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 1 Comment

Nursery Rhyme math to coincide with our nursery rhyme readings in history! Most nursery rhymes originated during the Middle Ages and Renaissance to help teach lessons to children.

I got this journal free from a TpT shop. She must’ve taken it down now. She has lots of other fun printables though!

We talked the math problems through and they helped me figure it out. I wrote it on the board and they copied it on their papers.

This one is Humpty Dumpty’s men. Five men…how many fingers did they have to help Humpty Dumpty?

The finished page…drawing…words…equation

Music Math!

Dad taught the count of the musical notes and helped them through counting their notes on these fun math pages.

8th notes…counting by twos. they enjoyed having something different in math.

Check it out here…Early Math with Mozart!

Filed Under: Classical, Daddy Time, Elementary, math, music, notebooking, Tapestry of Grace Tagged With: dad, math, music, notebooking, nursery rhymes

Reader Notebook

May 15, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 4 Comments

I saw this on Pinterest…and I love the idea. I had started this with Elizabeth a couple years ago and it rather fizzled, but I think she was too young then. We were using Ambleside Online and it worked for a while.

I also did this with my gifted 8th grade students years ago. (They’re graduating from college this month – wow!)

I think this reader notebook is beautifully done.

I plan to start a reader notebook again with Elizabeth now that she will be entering 7th grade. She needs something more with her reading. We use Tapestry of Grace and she reads lots with that, but I still feel like we’re missing some great literature and she needs to learn how to analyze it. Before, I’ve given her so much freedom with her reading. And that was good. She loves to read. Now she will love to analyze it. Yes, she will.

She may not love it, but she’s going to start notebooking with a classic novel or reading unit each month. I plan to include Shakespeare, poetry, and later on, in about a year: To Kill A Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. I plan to let Elizabeth choose some books too. She has great taste in reading and I think she’ll be thrilled that she has finally reached a stage where she can finally read some mature content. I can hardly wait to read Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, A Separate Peace, and Orwell in a few years!

I have a binder set up with dividers. The 5 dividers are

character analysis
narration/summary (by chapter or act or section)
vocabulary
literary analysis (minilessons we will do together)
reader response writing section (I will assign thinking questions based on reading and minilessons – these could turn into larger writing projects at the end of units)

I plan to include notebooking pages in each section to make it fun and interesting. Elizabeth already has a reading minioffice and we have reader response bookmarks. I have journal topics too. I’m excited to get started on this!

We’ll have a Monday conference time to discuss expectations and schedules. We already do this with Tapestry of Grace work. I will check back in on Fridays or Saturdays to see the progress. I know it will take some hand-holding and organization and explanation in the beginning. Elizabeth is very clingy with new things. After the first unit and the first month, I hope she gets the hang of it!

Elizabeth chose to read Where The Red Fern Grows as her first book. I actually have never read it, so I’m excited to get started this week!

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