How to make an interactive history notebook

Every year as I prepare our history lessons I make a new history notebook for my kids.  My goal is to make their history notebooks interactive and something they will use to remind them of the events in history.  After several years of doing this I’ve worked out a pretty good system. I realized this could be a useful Homeschool How To for y’all, so you too can know how to make your own interactive history notebook.

(This post is sponsored by Dover Publications, all opinions are my own)

Getting set up for making your interactive history notebook

First, gather all of your materials.  I put our interactive history notebooks together from several different sources

1.  Dover Publishing history coloring books (they’ve recently released an Alexander Hamilton coloring book, I wish this had been out BEFORE we studied the American Revolution and the Founding of the country)

2. Notebooking pages- you can get these from a variety of sources, this coming year I will be making my own, but I’ve previously used them from: Notebooking Nook, Bright Ideas Press, and Currclick

3. Lapbook pieces- I personally skip this because my kids don’t like them, but I do, go with your kids’ tastes

4. Game pages- if you can find some fun silly pages like these interactive pages from the Constitution activity book, they can be fun to include (side note, I also like to use books like this for car trips and will hoard them for that purpose)

5. Maps- I love maps. You can find them online, or splurge and pick up a copy of Wondermaps.

Important note about using history coloring books

For many years I was under the mistaken impression because the quality of these books are like my reproducible teacher books that I could just copy as many pages as I wanted for a project.  That is not true.

In more recent years I’ve become more aware of copyright laws, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t tell you to do something illegal, so I emailed and asked Dover what their rules are.

– you can use up to 4 images from one Dover coloring book once on one project
– you can use up to 4 images from one Dover coloring book as many times as you want on one project

If you use over 4 images from one Dover coloring book for one project, you must ask for permission to do so. 

This works out just fine for me because I have the entire run of their American Revolution coloring books now that I have their Alexander Hamilton coloring book, and a few more that are historical fashion (yes I buy them for myself for research purposes, don’t look at me like that), and a whole slew more.  This picture right above here, that’s only a SMALL fraction of my collection (I might have a large portion of their historical fashion coloring books and regularly use them as art inspiration, OH! That’s another great post idea).

Now obviously this probably will not be relevant to most homeschoolers, but if you are planning to use this in a co-op, it’s good to know what their rules are.

A note on what I used to put together this historical notebook

Dover Publications has several different types of history coloring books and history activity books that you can use for your history notebook.  I love books like this to keep fidgety hands busy during read alouds and listening to history lessons.  They also have some hidden benefits.

• There’s some great visual acuity stuff in these pages
• Fine motor skills to complete mazes and for coloring
• little math bits
• reading skills as you solve puzzles (though I wouldn’t include that particular page for my kids because they’d get too distracted, but it’s gonna be awesome for our trip this summer)
• I love the super awesome new craft and activity suggestions in the new Alexander Hamilton coloring book (and yes as I paged through the book I was humming bits and pieces of the musical, Broadway music and history? Of course, I’m listening, though not when the kids are around, language).

Also, want to say I’m super impressed with how quickly they updated their Presidents coloring book, they already have President Trump in there.

Funny side story, I was helping a friend move, and she had a Ronald Reagan paper doll book someone had given her “Because you homeschool,” from way back in the 80s by Dover.  I remember seeing the exact same idea for President Obama a few years ago.  I wonder what the Donald Trump paper doll set will look like.

Actually setting up this interactive history notebook

(Sorry, I’ve rambled a bit, I have a lot of stories about Dover Publication books because I’ve bought a lot through the years, actually Batman’s first cookbook and part of what inspired him to want to become a chef actually came from Dover Publications, and those recipes taste good, and you can color the pages)

I printed out my notebooking pages, and every few pages I put in a new history coloring page or history activity page.  I realized as I was looking through these different history coloring books and I realized the first FIVE American presidents were either active participants in the American Revolution, or part of the Constitutional Convention, and it was rather impressive to me.

Get your own history coloring books (I’ll warn you, they’re a

More interactive learning

• Steps to the American Revolution
• Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• STEM challenge: Design an aqueduct
• Life of a Sailor Unit
• We didn’t start the fire history lesson