I’m not one for busywork, but I would like the kids to write a little more. I’ve asked Mars to keep a special journal for the presentations she has done at the homeschoolers’ club meetings. After a break, she has gone back to copywork again and this time, we’ve set more stringent standards as she herself has expressed a desire to have better handwriting.
Bear has been composing poems – some sound like cute little haikus and all have a touch of drama to them! I’ll have to ask her permission before I reproduce them here. She is quite a shy little girl still and sometimes objects to having attention drawn to her. (I’ve tried to respect her need for privacy and this is why I don’t blog about her as much.)
We’ve been revising the Stories of the Prophets. We’ve studied them before and loved them to bits. It seems that every time we read, we learn something new and find nuggets of wisdom that we can apply to our daily lives. We are thus revisiting these stories, but in greater depth this time.
I’ve made some notebooking papers for documenting our learning points. Of course, any regular notebook or paper will do for journalling, but we have a boatload of paper from the Dad Man’s office that he no longer has use for – they are used on one side, so we are printing on the other. A bit of green living and an excuse to pretty up our papers :)
Here are some notebooking sheets for The Story of Prophet Adam `alayhis salaam. You can download them at Scribd if you have an account or you can just download them here. I’ve kept them pretty simple – not a lot of clipart or anything of the sort. I thought that the kids could draw their own pictures if they wanted. There are extra sheets for fillers and also a few for younger writers, with primary lines.
Please let me know if you have any issues with the document… I hope you like it!
*Edit: I’ve corrected a couple of mistakes and amended the primary lines, so please download the latest version!
Assalamo alaikum,
JazekAllah khair for these, inshaAllah I will definitely use them! Sadly my children hate writing, they would be happy enough to narrate and me do the hardwork, but I do feel that it is a vital skill. I’m sort of lost on this one.
Anyway, back to your hard work :-) I would really love to learn how to make my own notebooking pages such as yours, are there any step-by-step sites that you are aware of?
Also, do you get your girls to write out rough, then copy on to the notebook page, or do you just let them wing at it immediately?
wa `alaykum as salaam wa rahmatullaahi wa barakaatuh Umm Salam!
My elder daughter is not a writer either! She really wants to try cursive handwriting but she needs to work on her script penmanship first. I ought to have been more consistent with her penmanship lessons :(
For copywork lessons, when they write out only short sentences or extracts, they wing it immediately, as you say it :) I tell them that they must put in their best effort the first time they try. For notebooking, essays and such, they write it out in rough first just so we can go through the grammar, spelling and punctuation.
I just use MS Word to make the notebooking pages and then save in PDF format. I have bunches of fonts and clipart, if any, is also from Word… The lines are tables actually – I just amend the row height to suit my kids’ handwriting. I try to make the lines a little larger for Mars as her handwriting can be a bit messy. For the primary lines, they are tables too and these I made a little narrower because Bear’s handwriting is a little small. Some of the handwriting papers with primary lines online are a little wide and my kids don’t like these. In shaa Allah I’ll upload the MS Word versions of the notebooking papers so you can play around with them :)
[…] liked the font that I used in the Prophet Adam papers and wanted her notebook to have a uniform look. I like trying out different fonts. So there are two […]
Assalaamu alaikum Sis!!
JazakiAllahu khairan for sharing these pages! They are beautiful!!!!!!!!! :) I love the notebooking idea and inshaAllah, will implement this at home soon!