Nature Activity for the Week.

We have been ignoring our nature activities these past couple of weeks; and now that the weather is cooling off and the leaves are changing, I decided that we better get back to learning from Mother Nature! I've planned some outdoor activities as well as crafts.

This week we are reading our monthly issue of Your Big Backyard. We love this magazine because everyone enjoys the pictures and the stories. It also gives us great ideas on nature studies and crafts. We will also be doing the "Leafing Through Leaves" activity suggested as a go-along. In this activity you basically collect different leaves and make leaf rubbings. After collecting leaves and placing them in our nature journal, we will be using the following website to help us identify the tree that the leaf came from...What Tree Is It? This activity is simple enough for Anthony to enjoy, yet provides enough complexity for older kids. Trying to figure out the tree is like solving a mystery!

The Current Issue of Your Big Backyard.

We will also be doing the NWF Green Hour Activity. You can find it at NWF Green Hour. I'm sticking with the craft part of the activity, especially for Anthony and Isabella. Hopefully Marco will enjoy the poem writing. The great thing about all the nature activities we have planned is that they all go along with each other, making it easy to tie it all together. As you can see, I am a great fan of the National Wildlife Federation. Their magazines are great as well as their websites!!

You can find the whole NWF Green Hour Activity at their website.

Lapbooking and Notebooking.

I have had a great time creating lapbooks with the kids this past year. Now that 1st grade is upon us, we'll be adding to our lapbooking by starting with notebooking. Don't know what either one of these things are? Here's the scoop!

Lapbooking: "an inexpensive portfolio or collection of mini-books, flaps, and folded display material, that provides interactive space for drawings, stories, graphs, graphics, time lines, diagrams, and written work, from any topic, unit study, book you choose, gathered, glued, and creatively displayed in a coloured standard sized cardboard folder, often folded in a “shutter-fold”..., that fits in your lap." http://lapbooking.wordpress.com/1-whatis/

Lapbooking is great in that you can do it with a 2 year old or a 17 year old. The difficulty of the project is up to you! Our best use of lapbooks come when we are doing unit studies. It's a handy little way to wrap up all the stuff your kids learned into one handy area. It's also easy to save since they don't take up a lot of space.

If you are just getting started, I highly recommend Dina Zike's "Big Book of Books." Here, you can learn all kinds of folds to include in your lapbook. Another great book is "The Ultimate Lap Book Handbook." This one also teaches you the folds and includes some lapbooks you can do. They make great reference books if you plan on using lapbooks as part of your curriculum.

If you are interested in getting more detailed information, free resources, free lapbooks, samples of lapbooks, and just about anything related to lapbooks...here are some websites that I often visit when I start planning a new lapbook.

Lapbooking on Squidoo
Homeschool Helper (free lapbooks!)
Lapbooking 101 (great resource)
Lapbook info on Jamin's blog (another great resource!)
Lapbook Lessons (Lots of links, how-to's, and info)


Notebooking: this is probably self-explanatory. It is, basically, creating a notebook and falls along the lines of scrapbooking. Notebooking can be as simple as you want it to be with information being put into 3-ring binders. These notebooks can be made per subject and include maps, reports, narrations, science experiments, project results, drawings, worksheet pages, timelines, and just about anything else that is considered relevant work by the student.

Notebook is probably the easiest way to gather your child's work and notebooking pages are among the easiest to create on your computer (and find for free on the Internet!). If you are a scrapbooker, you'll find that creating an elaborate notebook is as enjoyable as putting together a scapbook page. Notebooking, much like lapbooking, can also be done with a preschooler or a high schooler. The older the child, the more their involvement in creating pages for their notebook.

Since we are embarking on a classical homeschooling journey, narrations and nature studies will be a large part of what we do. Notebooking is going to be the method of choice for collecting our work. Each subject will receive it's own notebook and the complexity of how they are put together will depend on how we are feeling at the time. The great thing is that you can always come back to alter your notebook at the end of a unit or chapter. It's a great way to review!

Still want more info? Here are some great sites that I've been visiting lately to get me ready for a new year.

The Homeschool Mom (great info and links!)
Notebooking A-Z
Free Notebook Pages and Printables
Notebooking on Squidoo (we love Squidoo!)
Free Notebooking Pages on Homeschool Helper

I hope the links I provided are enough to get you started on your journey into lapbooking and notebooking. They are both wonderful tools to add to your homeschool!