Making booklets with your printer

Booklets are popular around our house.  It seems that the pre-second grade crowd is especially fond of making their own booklets and it is a great way to reinforce lessons.  I use the half-page booklets most often – this just means that each side of a piece of paper will have two pages on it.  There should be four pages on each piece of paper, front and back. Make sure you leave your document in logical order because the printer will make sure the pages are arranged so you can just print, fold, and bind.  

 

Printer Trick

Did you know that you can make almost any multi-paged document into a booklet using just the options that come with your printer?   Go into the preferences for your printer and check out what it can do!  It will take some trial and error, to get things just right, but it is well worth the effort.

 

If you have an HP Officejet 6210 All-in-One plus MS Word (or Adobe Reader), then you can use these steps to help get you started.

 

1. Open a document with several pages in Word or Reader.  It helps to have a footer with page numbers turned on to visualize how it will print out. 
2. Chose  File – Print – click on Preferences.
3. Looking in the Printing Shortcuts tab, you will see it ask “What do you want to do?”  Use the dropdown arrow and choose Booklet Printing.  
4. Click Okay to close the Preferences window, and Okay again in the Print Dialog box to print the document.

 

Good luck!

Here are some ideas on what to put in your booklet

 

• Scan in your childrens artwork
• Use construction paper for the cover
• Put chores or goals on each page and use it as a reward sticker book
• Create a pictionary
• Use light grey font color for children to trace in words
• Create themed booklets like shapes, ABCs, numbers, etc.
• Use a sewn binding (older kids) or just staple
• Make a mini journal
• Dot-to-dots, mazes, other puzzles
• Autograph book (This is great for family reunions.  Have relatives sign, and make sure they add their relationship to you – this really aids genealogy projects.) 

Home School Schedules

At the beginning of the school year, I plan out each subject, noting how much material should be covered each quarter.  However, I do not make the quantity of the work my primary goal.  I wish to emphasize the quality of the experiences my children have; experiences teach much more effectively than books.

At my home school, I can’t tell what I might be doing one day to the next.   We do many surprise ‘field trips’ and other activities that take us away from the day to day seat work we normally do.  Between doctors, dentists, optometrists, allergists,  sick days, family outings, and other special occasions, it is hardly worth my while to plan too far in advance.  On average, I plan assignments a week in advance. Each Monday morning, I sit at my computer and make sure all my records are up to date.  As I look at each subjects completed assignments for the previous week, I create the assignments for the current week. Not planning to far in advance also gives me the option to move incomplete  assignments to the following week without too much hassle.

Tricks that don’t work on this home school mom

Children have a natural talent to circumvent anything they perceive as drudgery. If you are like me, you feel accountable for the quality of education you supply to your children. Unfortunately, what we perceive as opportunity and responsibility, children sometimes see as (they say in the vernacular) a drag.   As a home schooling parent, I can not let this happen with home school activities (or any other part of the household, for that matter!) since chaos shortly follows and then no one benefits. Here is a list of common stall tactics my students use:

• Constant interruptions (changing the subject, too many questions, asking for drinks, etc.)
• Negotiating to do the least favorite job last (then they do everything else so slowly that they never get around to the last job)
• Playing possum (pretending to not feel well)
• Conveniently misplacing things needed to do the job
• Amnesia (conveniently forgetting to do it)
• Shabby work (partially done, sloppy, or not even the correct assignment)
• Plain Stubbornness (just refusing to work)
• Tit for Tat (wanting something extra for cooperating to do the undesirable job or offering to do extra chores to get out of the undesirable job  – this can be tempting, but in the end, everyone will lose)

Sometimes children will do these things without really thinking about them.  Other times, they have well laid plans.  Either way, making sure you do not reward these behaviors is very important to ceasing the perpetuation of the objectionable behavior.  Usually, the entire point is to put off a task, so here are a few ways I deal with it:

• Make the task due immediately (I call this ’stopping the world’ – absolutely nothing else happens until the task is done, with the exception of breathing)
• Make it the least-liked assignments the first items on the to do list (I like to teach ‘just get it over with.’  Google the term “If+you+have+to+eat+frogs”)
• Require the task to be done more frequently (if you try to get out of writing science definitions at my school, you will end up writing definitions in every subject)
• Assign multiple copies of the same task to be done, without access to the prior completed ones (repetition  = boredom)
• In some cases, I have been known to ‘alter’ an assignment when there has been demonstrable cause to do so.  Being reasonable shows your students how to adjust to changing circumstances.

As usual, the best way to equip yourself for dealing with children is to know each of them well.   Children give us the chance to be like angels.

Habit and Routine

Habits are usually thought of in a negative way.  Nail biting, nose picking, and other undesirable acts can be at the very least embarrassing.  And if you think about how difficult it is to stop a habit, it is quite clear that you want to avoid starting them in the first place.  However, habits can also be positive, and if we focus on positive behaviors and make them a habit, we much better off.  Brushing your teeth, daily cleansing, and exercise are just a few good habits that you can create for yourself. The trick is to get into a routine of healthy habits and be consistent enough to make them stick.

Remember: The easiest way to get rid of a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.

Get Ready for the New School Year

It is really important to be ready for school to start.  A smooth start is much preferable to chaos, and the children will benefit from an ordered atmosphere.  Here is Alpha Omega’s advice on how to get the best odds for a smooth start.

Doing Things Differently This Year

I am not keeping records on paper anymore, it’s just too difficult with more than one child to document – I will be using Homeschool Tracker, a great program that I just came across.

I am using all Christian and/or Anabaptist curriculum.  A combination of Abeka and Christian Light.

I will focus more on building good character and a string value system as opposed to academics.

We will go on more field trips, and make sure Dad comes on at least one.