Intentional Parents

I buy three-ring binders in bulk at Sam’s Club. Now, if you’re like me, you grew up with three-ring binders full of hundreds of sheets of notebook paper and several dividers labeled with school subjects like Math, Science, and English. But that’s not what we use these binders for. These binders are for hobby notebooks. These binders are for fun!

When one of my daughters was about eight or ten, she began showing an interest in dogs. She would gravitate toward dog books at the library and check out books about various breeds. If we saw a dog at the park, we would ask her what breed it was, and nine times out of ten she would know. So I encouraged her to start a dog notebook. In it she put magazine pictures of various breeds of dogs, labeled; printed pages from Internet sites about dogs; poems about dogs that she copied in her best handwriting; her own sketches of dogs. Anything that had to do with dogs, she put in a sheet protector (also bought in bulk at Sam’s) and put into her notebook. Soon her dog notebook grew so large that we separated its information into two notebooks: dog breeds and dog training.

Another daughter created a notebook about cats. When her interests changed, she started a new notebook about gardening, flowers, and herbs.

The point is that hobby notebooks are something fun for the children to do in their free time and as their interests dictate. We simply make the notebook materials available and encourage the process.

Benefits of Hobby Notebooks

Just between us parents, hobby notebooks also reinforce these character traits and school skills (but don’t tell the children!):

• Love for Learning

  Learning when you don’t have to is a foreign concept to many children and adults today. So many people have had any love for learning “schooled” out of them. A hobby notebook can cultivate the sense of excitement when you discover something new about your topic, as well as the sense of accomplishment as you see your notebook expand. It can nurture that love for learning that God designed us to have all our lives.

• Personal Initiative

  Hobby notebooks are personal. The notebook’s owner decides what he want it to look like, what goes into it or doesn’t, when he wants to look for more discoveries to add to it. Hobby notebooks can cultivate the skill of self-education. The children (and adults) figure out that they don’t have to wait for or depend on a structured class in order to learn something. They can teach themselves a lot with the proper resources and enough time to soak it in.

• Order

  Notebooks and sheet protectors help the child organize his findings by keeping all that information gathered in one place. If he collects lots of information, he will soon see the benefit of arranging it by subject or forming two notebooks dedicated to related subjects. It can be a great lesson in orderliness.

• Creativity

  Because the notebooks are the children’s own projects, they are allowed complete creative license over those projects. Each child can decorate, embellish, doodle, sketch, paint, cut, shape, and otherwise customize his notebook as he pleases to reflect his own personality.

• Handwriting

  A fun part of notebooking is done by handwriting. Children can copy poems, captions, charts, slogans, or just add personal comments to their pages. And usually, since the notebooks are their personal projects, any information that they write is done in their best handwriting. Great penmanship practice!

• Research Skills

  When a child wants to find more information to add to his notebook, you have a prime opportunity to help him learn research skills: how to use the library, how to use the Internet, how to use a copy machine, how to use a dictionary or encyclopedia (whether in printed form or software). The children will be more eager to learn these skills if they are searching for information on topics that interest them.

• The Topic of the Notebook

  Whether birds, quilts, World War I, or cooking, hobby notebook topics are endless. As your child compiles and creates his own notebook, he will be learning about his topic of choice. Some topics he may only dabble in; others he may latch onto for life. Either way he is experiencing a broad and generous curriculum!

Parental Involvement in Hobby Notebooks

Hobby notebooks should be child initiated! Don’t assign them as a requirement. Once the child has expressed an interest in a hobby, you can casually suggest the idea of creating a notebook, but don’t push.

How much parental involvement you need to give depends on the age of your child. Children who can’t write well will require a lot more help than older children. But your main responsibility is to help and encourage without pushing or having expectations. This is their project, not yours.

From our experience, I’ve been involved in basically three ways. First, I’ve made casual suggestions as appropriate. For example, if I see a little article in a magazine that talks about one of the children’s topics, I’ll mention it to her and say something like, “That might go well in your notebook.” That’s it; end of comment. It’s strictly up to her whether she wants to add the article. Second, if they want to look for information on the Internet, I’ll help and supervise their surfing. Third, I try to keep the binder, sheet protector, and paper supplies well stocked. (Oh, yes, sometimes I’ll buy some stickers that go with the theme of a notebook if I see them on sale or something.)

So I guess we could sum up parental involvement in two words: equip and encourage.

Design-It-Yourself Hobby Notebooks

You can create a fancy notebook that’s more like a scrapbook if you really want to. We started doing hobby notebooks way back before the word “notebook” became a verb. Now there are all kinds of resources available! One of my favorite is Notebooking Pages.

But keep in mind that hobby notebooks don’t have to be expensive or elaborate. A generic white three-ring binder with sheet protectors to hold whatever you want to throw in it works just as well. If you get the kind of binder that has the clear plastic over the cover, the child can create a cover page and slip it into that plastic for a custom hobby notebook. And if your child continues in that same hobby for a long time, he can easily create a new, more sophisticated cover as he grows older.

However you decide to do them, hobby notebooks are not intended to stress out mom or child. They don’t have to be fancy, and they aren’t even mandatory. They’re just a fun idea that has worked well in our family (and has probably been a pretty good deal for Sam’s Club, as well).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Academics, The Five Gifts of Intentional Parents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.