American History Notebooking

My son Cainen & I love using Winter Promise! These are pictures of what he has been working on this past year. American Story 1 came with a "Make Your Own" history notebook and "Timelines In History" The pages allowed Cainen to illustrate his pages, respond to questions, create artwork and solve puzzles! He loved doing the Norse math and decoding messages! We had a lot of fun together drawing a colonial postal route and making a colonial business sign too!
















In this history-based program we also got "Timeline Cards" that you can use for games and drill. On one side is the "Event" and on the other side is the "Date" and "Historical Significance" of the event.























Cainen learned so much about Native American Indians! Here's a coloring page he did of Cherokee Indians.















Cainen really enjoyed learning about Lewis & Clark's expedition!













American Story 1 also came with timeline figures that you can cut out and paste in the "Timelines In History" notebook.








Cainen absolutely LOVED learning about the Revolutionary War! I loved watching as history came alive for my son and seeing the eagerness of wanting to learn more about the Patriots and the British.











It was funny watching Cainen get all worked up over the British forcing the colonists
to pay taxes.












We also enjoyed the many activities! One of the resources was "Interactive 3-D Maps" which helped Cainen visualize the geography of important events.










Here's a map he did of Old Boston.








Here's a coloring page of Joliet and Marquette exploring the Mississippi. Another perk that was included in American Story 1 was notebooking pages that already had text printed on the page. Cainen got to illustrate the page with his own drawings.This style of notebooking is especially good for younger students for whom writing is a real chore.






Here we transformed a 3D craft into a 2D notebooking page! Some 3D crafts can actually be reassembled to fit into the notebook. This Pequot Indian diorama is a great example. After enjoying the project for a week or so, we put it in Cainen's notebook. Now 2D images can be neatly filed away in the three ring binder.












The first Thanksgiving!















The Croatan Mystery Tree










Here's a Boston Town meeting pop-up book! I loved the way it turned out!













You can use real things in your notebooks too; it will make your notebook more similar to an old fashioned scrapbook.

Examples include


* postcards

* artwork

* brochures

* feathers or hair from animals

* pictures cut from magazines

* photographs from field trips

You can even have some elements of lapbooking in a noteboook.
Any minibook can be mounted into a notebook! In fact, the entire lapbook could be put into a notebook. For some of the projects that are to big, a great solution would be to photograph the product and put the pictures onto the notebooking page.