History Notebook

I haven't updated in quite a while, but to be perfectly honest, I haven't really had a reason to. I mean, we do school, he learns, blah, blah, blah. Dull for blogging.  I did think though that you might find our history notebook interesting.
We are doing an abbreviated version of early modern and modern history this year so we can get back on the correct year in the 4 year history cycle next year.

You can find loads of free notebook covers on the internet from awesome homeschool moms who have done all the work for you and print them off.  The covers I used can be found at barefootmeandering.com (scroll to the bottom for the freebies).  This is the front of our notebook:

This is the back:

At the beginning of every year we have an "All About Me" page that goes in the front of the history notebook.  After all, it will be history!

Behind that there are several lined pages that he writes history words from each section of the history book we're reading.  He adds to it every week.  Sometimes there is only one word, sometimes there are 2-3.  I think he's up to 31 words so far (we're in week 22).  Last week's words were archipelago and canal.

Then we start the notebooking pages.  There are free notebooking pages out there on the web (mostly from those homeschool moms who do the covers), but I wanted a different layout and I wanted to incorporate some lapbooking elements into a few of them.  I use Power Point to create my pages.  I print them off on heavy weight paper so they will hold up well and be able to withstand the weight of the lapbook components.

The first page was on Mary, Queen of Scots.  Indy wrote out information about her and then we added some photos in a small booklet.

When we learned about Louis XIV (he wrote the roman numerals wrong the first time), we did a page about Versailles since we went there last year.  I included photos I took of Indy on our trip.

Here is some coloring he did when we studied Prussia (they came from The Story of the Word 3 Activity Guide).  He just glued them down.

When it came to the American Revolution, there was just so much stuff, I decided that he could just do a bunch of lapbook components.  He wrote in most of these (some I let him glue down the information instead of writing-there was a lot!) and then he glued them down to a piece of paper that I put a title on in Power Point.

For the Lewis and Clark Expedition, I just put a compass as a background photo.  Oddly, this is one of his favorites.  Well, I guess since he plans to grow up to be Indiana Jones, it kind of makes sense that he liked the compass, doesn't it?

The Civil Was was just as involved as the American Revolution!  Good heavens.  I took a slightly different approach to it though.  Before adding the lapbook components, I had him fill out a timeline.  This was very labor intensive.  This is the front page.

This is the back of the timeline and some of the lapbook components.  Some he wrote in, others he pasted down information.

This is the back of the second Civil War page and the page on Thomas Edison.

There are of course many more pages, but I didn't want to overload blogger with a million photos.


Most of the lapbook components come from either dynamic2moms.webs.com or homeschoolshare.com.  These are all free! 

I hope you enjoyed seeing a little slice of our year.

More Lapbooks

While I'm unpacking the 3 million boxes from our move (Indy IS doing school though!), I thought I'd share 2 other lapbooks we did this past year.

After the earthquake lapbook inspired by the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, we moved on to volcanoes.  This was a very involved lapbook that took about 2 weeks.  There was a lot to learn!

Cover

First fold opening:

Second fold opening showing the bottom flap (it folds down):

Inside with the flap down:

Close up of inside a volcano:

 The Ring of Fire:

Tsunami spin insert and vocab words:

When we studied Renaissance Italy, Indy became fascinated with Leonardo Da Vinci.  We took an entire week off school and learned solely about him and his fascinating life.  This too was a very involved and HUGE lapbook because there was so much to pack in.  I think we used 3 file folders stapled together.  It's quite bulky.

Cover: 

Inside the first flap opening:

Inside the second flap opening:

Inside the third flap opening:

Close up of his Renaissance drawing.  Inside this booklet was information that he wrote about the architecture of  the Renaissance.

Info about Leo's life:

Indy's writing backwards experiment:

I couldn't get a good photo of it, but we also included a Euro coin minted in Italy that had Leo's Vetruvian Man on the reverse of it.  In case you don't know, while Euros are all the same on the front, and accepted in any country that it part of the EU, each country mints Euros and puts something representing that particular country.   The €1 in Italy has the Vetruvian Man.  Every time we get one Indy swipes it and adds it to his stash.

Earthquake lapbook

In my previous post I mentioned that with all the media coverage of the Japan earthquake, we would start a unit study of them.  We opted to make a lapbook with our study.  Indy really enjoys making lapbooks and I do too, I just forget about them.  Homeschoolshare.com  has loads of FREE lapbook components and information on a wealth of subjects (we started on their HUGE volcano unit week).  All of the parts of this lapbook came from them.

Cover:

Inside:

We didn't have enough room in the basic folder for all the components, so I added another sheet of heavy card stock to make a flap that opens and give him more room to put things.   Here it is open:

Area under the flap.  We made booklets with info on the Haiti and Japan earthquakes:

Close up of one of the components (notice the neat handwriting!):

Indy really enjoyed learning about the earthquakes and has been riveted to the news to get the latest information on what's going on in Japan.