Using Interactive Notebooks for Your History Study

I am really excited to share with you today's post, because I get to introduce you to another lovely Homeschool TpT creator, The Curriculum Mom!

 
The Curriculum Mom has created a fabulous Interactive Notebook that will work as a perfect supplement if you are using Story of the World, Classical Conversations or any other Ancient World curriculum for your History Study.

If you've never yet had the opportunity to use an Interactive Notebook, let me explain a tad about them.

An Interactive Notebook has been already set up with various activities, often involving cutting and pasting, and folding the paper into unique little places for children to take notes.  For instance, take a look at this page from The Curriculum Mom's product, "Bible and Ancient History, Daniel to Rome".   I love maps because it helps to set the various stories from history in their proper setting.  My son loves maps because....well, he just loves maps.   So, first he wanted to color the map in, showing land and water areas.

And then, we decided to highlight the areas that covered the Persian Empire during the reign of Darius I.  If you remember our former post, "Why You Need a History Timeline", you'll remember that we keep notes and pieces of items we work on, on our timeline.  Well, guess what:  this Interactive Notebook worked perfectly for adding in fun, little folding note pages on our Timeline!

This particular Interactive Notebook covers a ton of things that Story of the World, Volume 1 covers! So, there are pages for Cyrus, Alexander the Great, the Punic and Peloponnesian Wars, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar.  It also includes activities for the Jewish holidays, Purim and Hanukkah, and it covers the Biblical Daniel and Queen Esther.

I love the cute little pictures on the activities, because my kids love coloring.  Out came the fancy gel pens and the colored pencils.

And we began to fill in some of those spots on our History timeline, that we hadn't included before.

I was very excited when we reached Ancient Rome in Story of the World, because I couldn't wait to cover the Punic Wars and Hannibal.  And this Interactive Notebook has several fun foldables for this time period.  The Curriculum Mom actually has several other Interactive Notebooks that cover a number of different time periods, so you will want to check out her store to see everything she offers. 

As mentioned, maps are our thing, so we definitely cut out the one included that showed Rome and Carthage.  And then we got to read about Hannibal.

The Hannibal foldable that we chose included three sections for note-taking:  The Oath that Hannibal took as a youngster (to never be a friend of Rome), Hannibal's plan to defeat Rome (surprise them with elephants by land) and how Hannibal failed (Scipio attacked Carthage so that Hannibal had to leave).

Drawing pictures of pirate ships to remember Caesar's early victory in defeating them. 

My son is in first grade, and is ready for beginning note-taking, as you can see above.  But so that we didn't over-do it, we also experimented with drawing pictures that could also help us remember what we had learned.  So, I wanted to mention pictures here as an option for note-taking, because I realize we have some young kids starting out here, and you can still use these fun note-taking foldables for them, too!

The point is, to learn and have fun while doing it.  And as you can see by the large grin, that's what we're doing here!  Yay!

For more information about this awesome Interactive Notebook, head over to The Curriculum Mom and check out her store on TpT!  This is an excellent history supplement for many age levels!