Our favourite way of recording our lessons is to create a notebook page.  I personally prefer to give my children blank pages and let them create for themselves (as opposed to BLM – black line master –  notebook pages).  When my children were young there was a lot of cutting and gluing, punching shapes and even using stickers.  Once they were allowed to use the comptuer they discovered all sorts of applications and techniques on programmes such as Word, Publisher and Powerpoint.  These days they enjoy using my scrapbooking programme, Storybook as another option.

When we give our children a blank piece of paper, and make tools and resources available to them they are learning very important art skills.  These days communication in the written word is very visual and often interactive.  Allowing, even encouraging, our children to play around with fonts, clip art, colour and even sound will give them exposure to this form of communication.

One of the assignments Nomi and Daniel had today was to create a cover page for their Australian Studies units.  We are using Australian Book Traveller and today I introduced them to the map (which they just drooled over!! They loved it!)  and then they had to make a cover page for their Binders.

This is Daniel’s – I think we sometimes discount the skills required, the skills that are being practiced when making something like this.    He designed the flag taking into account the resources we had.  He found a real flag he’s been waving while watching the Winter Olympics and copied it so he had the stars right.  He worked out how to cut the Union Jack, he needed spacial awareness to cut out the flagpole (leaving enough space to create a knob on the top), he coloured in the map of Australia.  He wrote the word Australia and traced it (fine motor skills) in texta to make it look nice.
Each one of these skills is the foundation steps for design, research, and writing.