- in How-tos , Q & A by Jimmie Quick
Q & A: How Should I Plan a Notebook?
Q: How should I plan a notebook?
A: Maybe not at all.
I don’t know that you need to plan a notebook. I don’t have this kind of thinking when organizing our homeschool. I don’t have a mental image of what the completed notebook will look like a the end of the year. I just let it happen organically.
I do think in terms of planning what printable pages we might need and any additional supplies such as page protectors. I sometimes consider the list of 50 things to put into a notebook to maintain variety.
But I also give a lot of ownership to my daughter, so sometimes her notebooking preferences may be different from what I planned. I have put plenty of printable notebooking pages into the recycle stack because Miss Creative had her own plan.
Notebooking is part of my weekly homeschool scheduling. I choose possible lessons to notebook and write that into my daughter’s assignment list, keeping to the grade appropriate guidelines that I outline in Notebooking Success.
My fear is that if you start “planning” your child’s notebook, it is no longer his notebook. It’s a binder full of assignments you gave him. So I would encourage a mom who is asking this question to plan notebooking time on the schedule, but not try to plan in extreme detail what the notebook will actually look like.