Notebooking Spotlight: Corrie and Notebooking for Kindergarten

(photo credit by Tilemahos_E)

Today we have Corrie in the spotlight.

I really like the idea of using a notebook, but for Kindergarten I couldn’t think of how to use it. After much thought, I decided to use our Kindergarten notebook as a portfolio of sorts. My daughter can put in all the really cool stuff she makes in homeschool like craft projects and pictures from field trips.   Everything is nice and tidy in a notebook that we can keep forever and not cluttering up my fridge.

One of the best things about having this portfolio/notebook is that she gets to show it to all the relatives whenever they visit. She can tell them what each picture is and what we did for each project. It is so nice to have relatives say, “Wow! She sure is learning a lot.”

Here is a math project we recently completed — a comparison book about things in our kitchen.

I cut index cards in half. Then I put pictures and words on them for things in the kitchen which is where we do homeschool. In the photo, you can see windows, booster seats, muffin tins, pictures, sinks, telephone, burners, and chairs.

My daughter made it super cool by suggesting we make it lift-the-flap. Under each flap she indicated the number of each object in the kitchen with Arabic numerals and pictures.

Here is page two which has flaps for boys, shields (a party decoration from a recent birthday), cupboards, outlets, pans, drawers, and girls.

This project took about a week. Each day I laid out all the cards and asked her to choose three to count. We made the flaps and underneath wrote the number and drew pictures of the items so she could “read” her book. We talked about which thing in our kitchen had the most or the least, how many more, how many fewer, etc. The book has a cover, two pages, and fifteen cards.

The key to this project’s success, I found, was telling my daughter what I wanted to accomplish and letting her choose the means. She did a great job.
Thank you, Corrie for sharing how you use notebooking with your kindergarten student. It is helpful to see how a very simple project can be so educational. The notebooking best practices I want to emphasize from your example are these:

• This notebooking assignment was age appropriate. It used pictures and interactive flaps and was spaced over the course of an entire week.
• Corrie let her child take ownership of the project, selecting how to demonstrate the concepts. In this case, the student chose to make fun flaps.

Great job, Corrie!  If you would like to be featured at on The Notebooking Fairy, please send me an email.