“TOG” Workbooks

First of all, let me say that I went FOUR years without workbooks.  In those years, I simply printed out SAP’s for the week and handed them to my children on Monday for them to put in their binders.  Sometimes I would print them out a unit at a time, sometimes not.  Workbooks have come about because I saw them here and fell in love with the idea of having all the pages bound and in one spot.

Our first year of workbooks was last year.  I printed and bound whole UNITS of History, Literature, Geography and Timline pages for each child and organized them by week.  This is the system that is explained on Karen’s website above.  These books were too thick to be bound with my Proclick (see info below).  Instead I took them to Office Max and paid a dollar or two to get the spiral binding.  With that kind of binding, I could not add pages throughout the unit, but I had printed out everything so the books were complete.  I even copied the Reading Assignment pages as well as the writing assignment pages.  These books took me about 2 days a unit to compile.  For the last 2 units, I had purchased TOG DE (Digital Edition) which saved me lots of time in printing out the various pages.  My Rhetoric son at the time LOVED his workbook!  It was perfect for him because everything was in one spot (and he only had to keep up with one book for most of his TOG work.)

This year, I wanted to try something different.  I have found that in our school now, we work much more efficiently when everything is broken down into smaller pieces.  So, I decided to make individual TOG Subject workbooks.  I printed out everything for the WHOLE YEAR for each subject and then bound them each in their own “subject book”.  Here is a picture of them…

I designed the covers in Print Shop and laminated them with a $30 machine I found at Sams.  Each of the books was thin enough to bind with my ProClick (see purchase info below.)  This is also a great way incorporate TOG into Workboxes.  (I promise to post about Workboxes in the future!)  Another benefit is the ease of adding and removing pages.  This feature came in handy when we decided to move Callie up to Dialectic Literature.  Callie also makes a timeline page each week with Timeline Creator and we punch that page to add it into her History workbook.

For the President books, I am giving each of my children a page or two from Notebookingpages.com's President Pages as we learn about each president.  I then add their pages to their Presidents' book.  (I did not print all these out beforehand because my children like to choose which pages they want for each president.)

We have probably had the best year so far in keeping up with our TOG work.  I am not sure this is because of the workbooks, although they certainly help.  Another contributing factor could be that I do not have high schoolers at home anymore J.

This gadget is worth its weight in gold...