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Making & Using an Animal Notebook

Animal notebooks are a fun way to incorporate science for all ages. Younger children especially love notebooks of any kind. It’s a great way to incorporate science into almost any topic and can be your science curriculum as well.

To start with you will need a 3 ring binder. If you plan on adding to it for some time then you will want to get a nice big one. Individual topic notebooks, like one on cats for example, can be thinner.

You will need dividers of some type. You can buy the tabbed kind or use card stock to print out the divider pages we have provided here. You will also need colored pencils or crayons, a glue stick, an something to write with. Now you are ready to begin.

For younger children keep it simple. Make the categories easy – mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. As the age of the child increases so can the complexity of the notebook. We have divider pages with the scientific names for various animals here for you to use.

You can also have topics for your animal notebooks. For example, jungle animals, rainforest animals, forest animals, animals of North America, desert animals, pond animals, ocean animals, animals of Egypt, etc.

Now on to adding to the notebooks. Use our generic animal detective sheets to get you started. We have one for older kids and one for younger kids. Cut and glue pictures of the animals, make mini posters on card stock and add them to your notebook. Print out information pages from the internet, add coloring sheets, make a model of your animal and take a picture to add – get creative!

Older kids can write detailed reports and extensive sections to their notebooks. They can extend into habitats, endangered species and current events involving a particular animal. They make great science fair projects as well.

So what are you waiting for? Get those notebooks ready! And then don’t stop at animals – make a history notebook, a notebook on cars, horses, art or any other topic you are interested in.

If you are studying a particular animal and need coloring sheets, puzzles or an animal worksheet just post it in the Homeschool Forum. I am always happy to help.

~Belinda Mooney

Belinda J. Mooney is a veteran homeschool mom of 7. She loves incorporating all types of learning from cooking to crafts into her children's learning. Her kids, ages 25 down to 7, can often be seen wearing togas (or other strange clothing) to dinner, doing school outside or leaping fences to get a picture of a strange bug. Her husband has threatened to eat the science projects.

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