For those of you who are doing history notebooks...

[Paula in MS]

I would like to hear what everyone is using for history notebooks/timelines. My dd will be in 1st grade next year and I am trying to nail down how we will structure our history notebook. I have looked at Hold that Thought, Homeschool in the Woods and History Scribe. There is no way that I will be able to talk my dd into drawing a picture for every narration, so I will probably not be able to use History Scribe.

Has anyone used the timeline figures from Hold that Thought? I would like some feedback on this as well.

Thanks for your time,

Paula

[Dawn]

My girls are in first and fourth grades and we follow the SOTW1 Activity Guide for how to put their notebooks together. Very simple - just a 3 ring binder for each and as we go through it, they stick their coloring pages, maps and narrations in it in order. I have the History Through the Ages timelines CD and the Record of Time book but haven't used them - I plan to pull them out for the second go round with the history cycle.

Not sure if that helps any, but that's how we do it! :) My girls love pulling the notebooks out to look through them!

[WTMindy]

When we did SOTW (for four years) we always did a weekly narration and the kids would illustrate it. I just used that handwriting paper that has the blank box at the top. Sometimes they were in the mood, and sometimes they weren't, but I made them do it and those are some of my most cherished of all their work. I love seeing their simple drawings. I also collected the maps, coloring pages, and took pictures of any projects we did. This is also a favorite part because the kids love looking back and remembering them. At the end of the year I had them comb bound and I have 4 (for each kid) special volumes. I didn't use anything other than what was in the SOTW activity guide.

Now, I'm using TOG and I wrote a post on my blog about my new notebooks (http://magnumopusacademy.blogspot.com/2008/02/pictures-of-notebook.html).

By the way, I love the Homeschooling in the Woods timeline CD. I love the CD because it is all in one place and you can resize the figures to be any size that you need them.

[Kate in Arabia]

We also have history binders. My 10 yr old writes summaries that we put in there, plus maps, coloring pages, and printouts of related pictures that interest them. My 6 yr old narrates summaries/stories to me, but only writes titles for the pictures and subjects, maybe 4-5 words per section of SOTW 2. For their binders, I took manila folders and wrote a time segment on each, then we put our pages in the appropriate folder.. so it's kind of like a scrapbook and a timeline in one, lol.

hth!

Kate

[Alana in Canada]

There are some free notebook pages for SoTW at Paula's archives. Drat--I can't find the link. I just print off the pages with the text box at the top and the lines below. It may be too small a space for the beginning narrator, however. There are some ruled paper sheets at Donna Young you can use, too.


However, don't stress. It's grade one. All you really need to do is get her narrating back to you in a coherent fashion. You write them down for her. Towards the end of grade one, she can copy them onto a notebook page. If she wants to draw a picture, great. If not, no biggie.

My daughter loved colouring and the maps in the AG. I simply got a binder and put them all in.

[cajun.classical]

Has anyone used the timeline figures from Hold that Thought? I would like some feedback on this as well.

I use the timeline figures from Hold that Thought. I like them. I like that they are all uniform in size and I really like that for the more modern events, photographs are used instead of drawings. I like the border around them as well. We color-code our timeline by coloring in the borders. The only thing I don't like is that you can only print out an entire sheet. So sometimes I have to print out a whole sheet for 1 or 2 events. I also wish that the Church history was integrated with the World History. Instead they are 2 separate cds.

Still, these are minor complaints. Overall I'm pleased and the price is certainly right!