A Wonderful Visit with Friends
09.04.10
Recently, we were blessed to have good friends of ours come stay for the week. Sarah & Rachel Cooney have been in our lives for nearly 10 years now (as well as the rest of their wonderful family), and we couldn’t imagine not knowing them! It has been a joy to watch them grow into beautiful, Godly women, who devote so much of their time and energy to other young women & teens. Amidst their busy lives, they came to CT (braving the possibility of seeing Mr. Black Bear) just to hang with us!!!
Hours of freeze tag, capture the flag, soccer, frisbee, dress up, coloring, games of miniature golf, ice cream, Oreos, and more! They even gave our girls adorable hair cuts (extra bonus that they are both professional hair dressers)!!! Clearly also fashion experts—just check out those fabulous glasses they are wearing in the pictures below!
When all was said and done, at the end of a super long day of play, these great friends still weren’t done. I had shared with them my goal of getting the ENTIRE school year planned, organized, and sorted into bins before September rolled around. So, each evening they helped me copy, print, sort, and bind up notebooks to go with each of our upcoming Wisdom Books. There were so many papers, that we lost count night after night. So I decided to add it all up just to see how much AMAZING hard work they did. They spiral bound 36 notebooks for our Wisdom Book Units, as well as 18 handwriting/ABC notebooks for our younger ones to use every month of the year! That’s a lot of spiral binding!!! I printed out my monthly calendar plans for each, grabbed related books off the shelf, and stuffed the bins. THANK YOU RACHEL & SARAH for being such AMAZING servants and friends. Our school year is planned till the end of the year! Wow- I set the goal, but I truly didn’t think I would reach it- Thank you for helping me—what a gift!
HOME SCHOOLING FAMILIES : If you are a home schooler and currently use “lap books” or something similar—might I suggest to you checking out one of my FAVORITE sites Notebooking Pages. It takes any unit or theme you can think of to learn about (from handwriting to presidents to ancient China) and sets it into pre-formatted pages. You could put them in a 3 ring or spiral bind them. I like binding them so they take up less space and lay FLAT on their work space. So as your kids are learning, note taking, writing, whatever- they can learn to organize all their work. I LOVE LOVE LOVE – did I say LOVE – these pages. They help me teach one topic to a LARGE variety of learning styles and abilities. Their site has LOTS of free down loads so you can sample. Of course being a lover of organized things, I bought the whole set. Check it out www.notebookingpages.com
Enjoy!
Hi Jill, we met in the family viewing room this summer in Nashville. In looking at your photo of the organized notebooks and Wisdom Booklets, I see other resources you have planned to use…do you already have these on hand or are they library books you need for that unit? Just wondering how you gather all the stuff you need for the WB to have ready. Thanks for the tips.
Thank you for saying hi! I am sending you an personal email with an explanation of everything.
Jill
Hi. I was researching using ATI and I came across your blog and links to your notebooking pages. I am homeschooling five children (my sixth graduated last year and is a farrier now), ages 1-13 and have held off on using ATI because of the age limitations…last time I looked there wasn’t anything for the younger ages. How happy I was to see all of the additions! Your notebooking pages are fantastic and I am going to talk to my husband tonight about using ATI for next year, when our school-aged kids will be 6, 8, and 14. With notebooking, even the 2 and 4 year olds will be able to do SOMETHING. Thank you for sharing your ideas.
By the way, I tried the link you left for the notebooking pages, and I think you left the “s” off of pages. It came up as not there, but since I was familiar with the site, I added an “s” and it came up with no problem.
Blessings to you and yours,
Heather
Heather,
Thank you so much for letting us know of this mistake. It is now corrected. We are grateful that this information has been helpful. May the Lord continue to bless your family as you train them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If you have any other questions about the wisdom books or anything else, don’t hesitate to ask.
Sean, for the Martin Family
Could you please share with me how to plan and organize for a whole year of the WBs and the binding process you use. I am not a natural organizer and need some help. I am enjoying your website. We are restarting the WBs.
Blessings,
Jane