How I Create a Plan for our Notebooking and Lapbooking

Keeping with our honeybee theme, I've put together another video of how I create my plans to go along with some of our notebooking studies. I've shown you how to create a notebooking page using Power Point 2008, but if you don't have a plan, sometimes it's difficult to know what to do with all these pages.

After the video I'll add the plan I have so far in a Word doc. so you can add to the plan or change it up some. I'll also write out how I plan my studies under the video.

Click below to open the Honeybee planner

Honeybee Planner Word.doc

Here's a list of the things I do to prepare for our units:

• Go to the library and check out books about our topic. I use these books to find vocabulary words and sub-topics for our study.
• I look up websites that will be useful during our study and link to them from my Word Document.
• I find books I'd like the kids to read during the study. I will most often have them read a living book. If you are unfamiliar with the term 'living book', here is a website that will explain it to you.
• If we were studying something from history, I'd put together a timeline of events.
• Again, if we were studying history, I'd find maps that would go along with our study, such as, battles, boundaries, exploration, and that sort of thing.
• Depending on our study, I may add many other things, such as charts and diagrams... the list is quite long. In fact, here's a list Jimmie put together of 50 Things to Put in a Notebook. It's a great list and we've added many of the things on her list to our own notebooks. 

Now, as I mentioned in the video, remember that the vocabulary list can also be used as a reference list to create an independent notebooking page or lapbook element for that word. It's great to have a list of words to look back on and study but in my opinion (and it's just that, my opinion) it's even better to have a page to help remember the word.

So there you go.... We will continue to make notebooking pages about honeybees now that we've got a plan to follow. I'll be adding 1-2 videos a week (as time allows) until I feel we've covered several sub-topics (please leave a comment if there is something specific you think we should add).  After we've finished with the notebooking pages, we'll start a new topic and I'll show you how to create a lapbook.

Please leave a comment telling my other readers how you plan for your notebooking studies. If you have a blog post, please leave the link! The best resources come from other experienced homeschooling moms. Thanks!

Click here to see all the video tutorials in one post.