Are your kids kinesthetic learners? I feel like a lot of kids go through a stage, especially when they are young, where they learn better when they can get hands-on. Interactive notebooks are perfect for this. You can use them for all ages, and all subjects.
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Interactive Notebooks for Kinesthetic Learners
I have used interactive notebooks in our house. My kids loved them. They gave them a creative outlet, it gave me their education. However, for me, they were a lot of work! For three kids in different grades.
What is An Interactive Notebook?
Interactive notebooks are based on composition or spiral-bound notebooks but go beyond simple note-taking. This tool helps children manipulate information and organize it in a way that makes sense to them. Interactive notebooks are not workbooks, and they are not scrapbooks.
Examples of Interactive Notebooks
We used the Carson Dellosa interactive notebooks. They are easy to use, with the instructions laid out for you right at the beginning of the books.
Using Them in Your Homeschool
For our first “lesson” with our notebooks, I cut out all the pieces. Which is probably when I started to be turned off them. That was a lot of pieces for three notebooks. I also glued the pieces in place just because I wanted them to see what we were creating.
After that, I simply printed off the pages we needed, and that was our arts and crafts and science or language arts lesson for the day. Yes, it can take quite a while to complete. You may find you’d rather do the cutting ahead of time.
Best Notebooks for Interactive Notebooks
In my opinion composition notebooks work the best for these notebooks. They are sturdy notebooks, the pages won’t fall out or rip out easily. You do not want to rip out a page from it or you’ll have another page fall out from the opposite side of the notebook.
You’ll also need a way to print/photocopy your pages – the books mentioned below that we have used were meant to be copied. And with a copier, you need paper.
You’ll also need scissors and glue. For the ease of gluing, I prefer glue sticks in our house.
Your kids are going to need something to color with: crayons, colored pencils, or markers.
If you feel like the traditional notebooks are too much work, you might want to try a digital version.