Notebooking Pages To The Rescue When Your Kids Hate Cut & Paste Activities

My children hate to cut and paste. With a passion. It’s all my fault.

I learned the hard way that there is too much of a good thing, but you won’t wreck your kids for life. Keep reading, and I’ll show you how I overcame my blunder and used Notebooking Pages to add fun back into our homeschool.

When I first started homeschooling I had no idea what I was doing. I thought homeschooling should look like school.

Duh, right?

The Danger Of Too Much Of A Good Thing

We started with workbooks from the dollar store.

The cute color, cut-and-paste ones.

And read. A lot.

Then, I found a cute online program called Letter of the Week. It is an amazing curriculum and has since improved.

It was certainly a life changer but the “school at home” mom (that’s me!) tried to do everything every day. At that time I remember a lot of cutting, pasting, and gluing.

As time went on, I started to look for other resources to add “fun” to our homeschooling. I stumbled across lap booking! Oh, the excitement! We did many lap books.

What Is Lapbooking?

You guessed it, more cut, pasting, and gluing, which is awesome, IF your kids like that kind of thing. IF you are balanced and do other things too. Did I do that? Nah…cut, paste, glue.

Disclosure: I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

My daughter started school and I found these beautiful, engaging, colorful math books: Singapore Math Earlybird Kindergarten Books. Did I mention you can cut out the activities and glue them on the right sheets?

Can you see where this is going? No matter how much you love something, if you do it day in and day out… it goes from fun to NOT fun, fast!

And let me tell you, my son, when he was super little, would color, draw, cut, and paste for days on end. This child grew to HATE it! In fact, I would take out crayons and scissors and he would cry.

In an effort to add to the workbooks and textbooks we studied, I would add in reading books, pretty notebooks to write in, and more. I started creating borders for printed paper at home for them to write notes on as the plain white loose leaf was practical but boring.

Then I returned to work and no longer found the time to create these pages each week.

Easy Peasy All-In-One Homeschool Fail

When I found Easy Peasy All-In-One Homeschool I felt overjoyed. This program saved my homeschool when I returned to work and that is not even close to an exaggeration.

That was before I knew what to look for in a working mom’s homeschool curriculum.

But there was one thing we were not thrilled about.

Easy Peasy uses many lapbooks. My children hated cut and paste. What was I going to do?

First, I had them make some of them, others they summarized what they learned and wrote paragraphs. I learned about sketch notes, and that helped. However, earlier this year I found the best thing ever.

NotebookingPages.com

Let’s see why I love them enough to include them on the list of must-have resources for the working mom.

What IS Notebooking Pages?

Notebooking is today’s way of saying journaling. It tells a story of your child’s learning. With notebooking pages, your child can record what he or she is learning in their own words, showcasing their personality and learning to write in their own unique voice.

Notebooking pages have two elements, visual and written. As both of my children love to draw and write, this works out great for them. Instead of just filling in the blanks, as with worksheets or workbooks, they get to choose what to tell you and explain it further by showing. Kind of like a show and tell.

Why I love Notebooking Pages?

As a working homeschool mom, time is not always in my favor. So when I discovered Notebookingpages.com, I was thrilled! Why? Because it has everything and it is easy to use.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Go to Notebooking pages.com and sign up

Free Notebooking Pages Product Sampler from NotebookingPages.com. 

Step 2: When you sign up you get over 600 free notebooking pages, that include everything! Basic Lined Set, Bible, A-Z, Famous Artists, Famous Composers, World Explorers, Copywork (Animal Themes), Ancient History, Nature Study (plants & animals), … and 3 complete country sets: USA, Canada, & Australia!

Bonus: You also get free training emails that will be sent out to show you how to use NotebookingPages.com. Watch for those. They are GREAT!

Step 3: If the pages you want are not in the free resource package, you can go to the “products” tab and use the search bar and enter what you want.

For example: We are doing chemistry and I wanted basic science pages. I searched and found Basic Science and Experiment Pages Tada! (You can see those below!)

You will note that says that this pack of basic science notebooking pages are great for reports, labs, experiments, and narrations. Included are basic pages that come with both primary and regular lines and with a variety of layouts using our 3D template layouts.

You could also use 3D mini-books to add an extra dimension to these pages! (learn more about that here, and watch the video!)

Step 4: After you choose your pages, add them to the cart and choose how to pay.

Step 5: Check your email and be sure to check your spam folders, especially if you are using Gmail. Download and print off as many and as often as you like.

Of course, an alternate step is to buy the lifetime membership, and then you skip the buying and downloading steps 😉

Use code discount5 to save $5 on any purchase $10 or more from the NotebookingPages.com Shop. (This does not include membership purchases.)

Easy right?

How I have used Notebooking Pages.com:

So far we have used notebooking pages in several ways, such as:

Instead of book reports, my children draw and write on note booking pages, basic lined ones such as these.

The ones above are for science, and when we met our blue lobster, I was excited to use these on Marine Invertebrates!

For my daughter who does not want to learn an instrument (at the moment anyway), we plan on using these on Famous Composers.

After reading about this really cool geography post, Notebooking Across the USA (States Unit Studies), I went searching for the Canada ones and found them! You can find all the country bundles here.

So that is where we are starting!

I am excited and so far the kids haven’t gone running when I pull out a pretty notebooking page for them to do along with their lessons, and that is a huge change and a big win for me!

Tell me do you use notebooking pages in your homeschool?

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