the kids' binders

First, I want to highly recommend a book I got on Amazon.com called "history pockets." They have many different topics, and I chose 3 of the American history ones and the boys really love it!

We had a busy day in school today! For art, we made Halloween paper chain countdowns, and made fall leaves for our wall tree:

Notice how there are none down low? (Baby) And Nathan's cute mickey mouse looking apple right in the middle:)

Here's how I do the kids' notebooks:

(The pics are in random order)

It's divided into: scriptures, writing, spelling, history, science, art, music and book reports.

In the front, there are checklists (there are 6 days per sheet) for me or the boys to check off as we do our subjects:

For spelling I write a silly story with their spelling words, and they fill in the blanks. The other days they make up sentences and I print them out and they fill in the blanks. Baby wanted to do spelling, too:)

This is their writing. I have them tell me something they learned, or write a journal, and I write it and they copy it:

For scriptures, I read the scriptures and they draw a picture about what we read. I write the verse numbers and the date and the title of their drawing:

For their book reports, I either have them write their favorite part and draw a picture:

...or I write it down for them. We keep a record of all our read aloud books this way:

For science we read a book, and then do an "experiment" (just a hands-on lesson really) and then they can write about it and make a drawing:

For history, here is a writing about what we learned that day. We are also doing "history pockets" but I am not going to keep them in this binder until we store it away at the end of the year. We also will have a time line (book of centuries) in the history section.

For art, they have a seperate sketchbook for drawings, but when we do the projects from "Discovering Great Artists" we'll have a copy of the master's art original and their reproduction on the other side of the layout. We've only done one project from that book so far, and it didn't really work out so I didn't put it in the binder.

I'm not sure what we'll do for music. Maybe I could have them write about the music they like, but I don't know. Maybe I'll wait for a stroke of inspiration. For music, I play them different types of music and talk about it, and we also learn songs from Wee Sing America (because we're doing American history this year) and Wee Sing Halloween (because we love holidays).