When I started homeschooling so many years ago, I was quickly caught up in the lapbooking craze. I loved the creative aspect of the lapbooks. I liked the crafty work. And I loved the final product to file away at the end of the year. As my oldest children aged out of lapbooking, I moved them up to notebooking, because that was what my friends were doing. I wasn't really thinking about WHY we should lapbook or notebook. It was just an interesting way of doing things.
But on my second round of homeschooling, I did a little more research on this....and realized I had been doing it all wrong. You see, I was focused on the finished product. I wanted something beautiful I could show to the family and our friends. So I wanted my kids to write exactly what I told them to. My kids were just mindlessly copying my notes, they weren't internalizing what they had learned.
Lapbooking allows your child to organize their notes into smaller, bite-sized topics. It is a chance for them to write down what they have learned in a way that makes sense to them. They can go back and read the little booklets they have created to remember the lessons they were taught. If I had let them come up with their own answers, it would have been more of a review for them. I could have used their notes to assess if they had really grasped the subject matter.
Now there are some things I just don't like about lapbooking truth be told. I really don't like assembling all the file folders into the different configurations for the books. And my boys have terrible handwriting. Trying to read what they scrawl on all of those tiny booklets, which don't have lines to write on, is nearly impossible. And frankly, they just don't have the crafty gene that I have.
So for my younger sons, I have found a wonderful way to blend lapbooking and notebooking... Interactive Notebooks. This really addresses some of the things I don't like about lapbooking, while still allowing all of the learning benefits.
They glue all those booklet covers into a spiral notebook or a composition notebook - no more gluing folders together.
They only use a booklet cover in the notebook - they are free to write their notes underneath on the lined paper.
They still get the benefit of writing their own notes about each topic in the notebook.
If you want to know more about interactive notebooks, come back and read my follow up post.
Happy Learning,
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