Lapbooks

Colonial Life Unit

prayingmother

Whew! We spent so long studying about the Thirteen Colonies and Colonial life. We started this study when I was pregnant, and it kind of came to a hault when I was so sick. But we finally finished it. We decided that we wanted to finish it with a Colonial meal, then we realized that we were awfully close to Thanksgiving, so the kids agreed that that would make for a great Colonial meal. It did! We had a great feast–vegetarian style!

Thanksgiving Feast

The kids dressed up in their Colonial clothes for the event. They’ve had so much fun with these clothes. It’s a little sad that they are going to grow out of them. The cousins that were here for Thanksgiving, also dressed up in Pilgrim and Indian costumes. What fun!

Colonial Costumes

Now for what we’ve studied for the last long while on the subject. We read some really good books on the Thirteen Colonies. We continued to enjoy This Country of Ours. We really do enjoy that book. The kids enjoy listening to the audiobook version while they work on their lapbooks. We also enjoyed some other books about different people and experiences of the Colonial time period. Some of our favorites were Roger Williams by Mark Ammerman, Tattered Sails (this one for it’s illustrations rather than the writing), Old Silver Leg Takes Over (Kids loved that book!), The Carving Tree (about Roanoake). We read several others, but these were the ones that we really, really enjoyed.

Of course, we did lapbooks on Colonial America too. Here are some pictures.

Lapbook covers by Zippy and JD Boy respectively

Colonial Lapbook Cover Colonial Lapbook Cover

Slideshow of Zippy’s (age 10) Colonial Lapbook

Slideshow of JD Boy’s (age 7) Colonial Lapbook

Composer Unit Study

prayingmother

We recently finished a unit on classical composers. We decided to just do an overview of them. We gathered up resources from a few places and really enjoyed every single one of them.
We listened to every CD in the “Story of Composers” series. (Here is a link to the one on Bach. You can scroll down to find the rest of them.) We listened to two CD’s a week and the ones we enjoyed most, we listened to several times. Now if I name nearly any one of the composers that we studied, JD Boy will be able to start humming the melody of one of the pieces from that composer. Have I ever mentioned that he is my auditory learner? It’s amazing!

This is a really enjoyable set of CD’s. We plan to listen to them many more times. I would recommend them to anybody. A couple of pluses on this set, besides the fact that they are just excellent, is that they provide a great way to do homeschooling in the car or, as in my case, do some homeschooling while the mama is sick. The other plus is that they are really inexpensive, which is always nice.

While we listened to those CD’s, G’tums colored pictures of composers that were printed off from the History Through the Ages Timeline Figures and JD Boy and Zippy made a timeline of the composers from the History of Classical Music Timeline by Beautiful Feet. (Both of these timelines are scrollable so please mouse over them and then start scrolling to see the whole timeline.)

Zippy's Timeline

Zippy’s Timeline

JDBoy's Composer Timeline

JD Boy’s Timeline

We also enjoyed reading the book The Story of the Orchestra and listening to the accompanying CD. From this book we were able to learn better how to distinguish the different instruments in the orchestra. This is a really nice book for a wide age span of children. All of my kids enjoyed it from the preschooler to the fourth grader.

Zippy also worked diligently on making a lapbook about music as we learned about the composers and about the orchestra. Here are a few pictures from her lapbook. If you’d like to see the rest, you can visit my Composer Lapbook set on Flickr. Most of the components for this lapbook were taken from the Composers Activity Pak by Homeschool in the Woods.

Composer Lapbook Cover

The Cover (Unfortunately water was spilled on it before we got any pictures, but Zippy has decided that it makes it look more artistic this way.)

Inside Composer Lapbook

The inside showing the book on periods of music, which describes each of the major periods of music; music definitions, which gives the definitions of each of the words printed on the piano keys; and the “Pieces with a Purpose” pocket, which has several little booklets that tell that different music was written for different purposes, i.e. some as hymns, some as patriotic music, etc.

Composer Lapbook Fully Opened

This is what you see if you flip up the center panel from the previous picture. In this picture is a map showing the birth cities of all of the European born composers; a bunch of little booklets with biography information about the composers; a booklet defining godly music; and a booklet with the five main types of instruments. There are also some stickers used for decoration.

Godly Music Book Cover

Godly Music Book Inside

This is the booklet on godly music. I just thought this was such a great quote about heavenly music that I had her copy it and add it to her lapbook. During this study we also took the time to discuss what music is appropriate for Christians to listen to and what is not.

Beethoven Inside

This is the inside of the little booklet on Beethoven, showing what type of information she found about each composer that we studied.

We all really enjoyed this unit study. It helped all of us to learn to appreciate some of the lesser known composers as well as the famous composers. We also were able to identify a few composers, whose pieces we didn’t enjoy. Now we are going to go back and study our favorite ones deeper and see if the kids can learn a piece on the violin or piano as we study them a little deeper.

One of the benefits of this unit is that it worked well while I was feeling ill. I just made sure everybody had the right stuff that went with the CD that we were to listen to and then I pushed play and laid back and listened.

Kindergarten/1st Grade Math Lapbook

prayingmother

We have been having way too much fun with math around here. That’s a good sign, because math is supposed to be the most boring subject of all. My kids have had so much fun learning math without a textbook. I wish I would have done this sooner.

Let me tell you why I didn’t. I was afraid. Even though I’ve had plenty of exposure to homeschooling in my life–my husband was homeschooled, I have siblings that were homeschooled–still doing it on my own was scarier than I thought. So if you’re thinking that your too scared to try this approach to math, I don’t blame you, but keep it in the back of your mind if you have a child that hates math.

Every day I like Math on the Level more and more. The whole idea of not having a textbook for the kids is actually liberating. I have come to realize that Math on the Level will always require lots of parent time, but it’s fun time. I enjoy putting together the lesson plans and playing math with my kids. Best of all my kids are loving math, the same two kids who last year would whine and whine when I told them to get their math done. And my three-year-old loves it when the older two are doing things for math, because he can get his hands in on the action often too.

Okay, now to the lapbook since that’s my heading! Lapbooks are not part of the Math on the Level program, but as you might already know, they’ve become a fun part of our homeschooling experience and since Math on the Level is about teaching concepts, not about doing pages of math, I am free to teach the concepts multiple ways. So this week, I had my son review several of the things he had covered last year by making a lapbook. This lapbook evolved a little bit, because my original idea was to make what some call a mini-office so we started out making a few of the mini books on the computer. Then I thought better of the situation. I thought, "What is the sense of my making this lapbook for him to look at? This should be his project and then making it will be reinforcing it in his mind." So a few of the components were from the original concept and then the rest are his creation. (Some with my assistance.)

Here are the pictures.

Math Lapbook Cover

The cover.

Math Lapbook Open

The lapbook opened up.

Left panel is a slider to practice counting backwards from twenty. The top middle is his handwritten hundreds chart. The bottom is a seven-inch ruler. The hands on the clock rotate and so he (or I) can set the time on the clock and then read it. I uploaded the template for the clock and you can download for free at hslaunch by clicking here. I’ve also uploaded the template for the Counting Backwards slider.

Here are close-ups of the other two mini-books in the above picture.

Place Value Open

A close-up of the inside of the Place Value Layered Book.

Denominations of US Dollars

A close up of the Bills Book. I downloaded the artwork for most of the bills from a US Treasury website. I got the $1 bill from Wikipedia.

Math Lapbook Fully Open

The lapbook opened up further.

Math Lapbook Top Flap

The top flap.

The hands are quite obviously about learning left and right. Yes, they were traced from his hands. The "Numbers about Me" are interesting numbers that he had to figure out such as weight, height, clothing size, birthday, his age, etc. Inside the house is his address and phone number. I’m not going to show the insides of these two for what I think is an obvious reason.

Math Lapbook Inside

The inside of the inside of the lapbook. Close-ups following.

Spelling Numbers

Learning to spell the number names.

Coins Tabbed Book Open

Inside of the Coins tabbed book. (I got the artwork for the coins from the US Mint. It’s really nice artwork. Some of the coins on the front were stickers though.)

Shapes Layered Book Open

Some 2-D shapes.

You can probably tell which mini books he made and which ones I made. I just happen to think that his are way neater than mine. (You’re on your own now for making your own lapbooks, my boy!)


Train Tot Lapbook

prayingmother

The littlest member of my family is always wanting to "do school". He enjoys it more than anybody in the house, I think. He’s so anxious to grow up! (But I’m not anxious for him to grow up.)

This morning I asked G’tums what was his plan for today and he told me that he was going to make a train lapbook. So thanks to Carissa at 1+1+1=1 blog we made an adorable little lapbook together. The only thing we added was a package of stickers, because he loves stickers. Well, what three-year-old doesn’t love stickers?

G'tums (age 3) with his Train Tot-book

Proud boy with his very own lapbook!

Cover of Train Tot Book

The cover, made from stickers that I had picked up at Michaels.

Inside of Train Tot Book

A better look at the inside: The left-hand pocket has cards with different shapes on them. The middle book has a different colored train on each page, that he colored. The right-hand book is an accordion style fold that counts from 1-10, showing the correct number of trains to correspond with each number.

Here is the direct link to the lapbook: Thomas the Train Tot-Book. Or check out all of her Tot-Books, they’re really great. At least they made one little boy very happy today!

Thanks to Zippy too for the pictures. She loves her new camera.

Penguin Lapbook

prayingmother

We were so busy during the Children’s Bible Class that I posted about before, that we had a hard time keeping up with everything. So one morning I said to the kids, let’s do something on a preschool level that we would all enjoy. John Deere Boy came up with this idea and it was a hit–learn about Penguins. We had already seen the Easy Make & Learn: Penguin book, so I knew that there was some great printouts that we could use for a lapbook and other fun projects. So we picked up a couple of really great DVD’s and wala we had a short unit study that was stress free for mama!! Sometimes that really comes in helpful. So if you’re ever looking for a fun, short, easy unit that all ages will enjoy, this was a great one.

Penguin Lapbook

A very happy boy showing off his first lapbook! Each of the kids colored one of the penguins on the front and they plastered the lapbook with stickers. I thought that was the part my three-year-old would get into. Well, of course, he did, but so did the other two. This lapbook was actually a team effort by the three of them. He needed help so we helped him out.

Penguin Lapbook

Here are all of my kiddoes with their penguin masks and lapbook and, of course, the stuffed penguin. Now if you could just see them waddle too!

The really interesting videos that we all enjoyed about Penguins were: March of the Penguins, Nature: Waddlers & Paddlers and Life in the Freezer. All of these were very good and interesting. They appealed to all the ages in our home 3 – 32. None of them are from a Creationist perspective though, so you have to weed out some stuff. We’ve got our kids well trained at this point on that subject. Whenever they hear the words “millions” or “billions” they shout “Wrong!”

We didn’t read any books on the subject. Did I say I was busy? We watched videos and they worked on their lapbook while I made lunch. We were squeezing school in here and there!

My Thoughts on Lapbooks

prayingmother

I have had several different questions about the different lapbooks that we’ve made. I decided that I would just write a post on my developing philosophy of lapbooking as well as share my favorite resources.

Open Thanksgiving Lapbook A little history: I do not consider us to be “pro-lapbookers”. It’s something that we have learned to enjoy a lot though. We learned how to lapbook last summer at the Washington Homeschool Organization Convention. Tina from Jetihoja Academy was the instructor of that class. So I give a big “Thank-you” to her for introducing us to this idea. As soon as we learned about it, I knew that this was a great project for my daughter who is a very kinesthetic learner and also very artisitic. Immediately after the convention we tried out our first lapbook. We were in the process of learning about birds, so figured that would be a great place to start. We purchased our first lapbook from In the Hands of A Child and we had a lot of fun, but I immediately discovered something challenging for us. The challenge is that my daughter does not like to write a lot and the lapbook involved quite a bit of writing, so this is how I started developing my philosophy about lapbooking. I will say that the In the Hands of a Child lapbooks are very well done, even though they didn’t work for my daughter.

JDBoy and Lapbook My goals: My number one goal with lapbooks is to help my children love learning. I think that lapbooks appeal especially to the more kinesthetic learners as it is a hands-on project. My secondary goal is to teach my children to start developing the skills to produce reports even before they can write well. I also do oral narration with my children on what we study, so that they are practicing putting things into words.

So based on the personalities of my children and based on my goals, I have found that the best approach for us on our lapbooks is to make custom lapbooks. This also gives my children a chance to be involved in planning out what is going in the lapbook, although I’m the one that plans what we are going to study, so I really am the one doing most of the planning.

Exercise 2 My children love to design their own mini books. These are always the ones that they are the most proud of in their lapbooks too. One of the nice things when they design their own, is that they really are trying to figure out how to convey what they learned even though it may or may not contain words. I do use printables that I find here and there and I will list my favorite sources at the bottom. I mix printables with ones they design on their own. For instance, in our last lapbook, they pretty much designed all the ones that had to do with health habits and we used printables for most of the anatomy mini books.

Cover The best part of lapbooks is finishing them! My children are always so proud to show their grandparents and friends their lapbooks and tell them all about what they have learned. I consider this to be an important part of the project too. Their repeating over and over with pride what they have learned helps to plant the lessons in their memory.

Now when it comes to how to make lapbooks, others have already written excellent blog posts and lenses and all kinds of things on how to lapbook, so here is my list.

First, let me say that the second person that helped me so much with lapbooking was somebody I’ve never met. Her name is Jimmie and she homeschools in China, and tons of these resources are by her. So kudos to Jimmie too! (And check out her blog. It’s my favorite!)

My favorite lapbook links:

Philosphy:
Is lapbooking controling your curriculum? by Jimmie
Lapbooks–a form of narration by Jimmie
How (and Why) To Begin Lapbooking by Jamin

How to:
Lapbooking–basics, how-to’s by Jimmie (If you don’t look at any other links, please look at this one.)
Lapbook Lessons by lots of people (This site requires free membership, has lots of free lapbooks too)

Free printables:
Homeschool Share (tons of free lapbooks, requires free membership)
Love-to-Lapbook Group (this is a yahoo group that you must join, but it has the best collection of links for lapbooks that I’ve seen.)
Lapbooks by Carissa (Check out the tot books for fun lapbooks for toddlers.)

Pictures:
Simply Lapbooks (lots of great ones for K-1st) (This site has been removed.)
Lapbooking Group on Flickr!
Pictures of OUR lapbooks

To Purchase:
Dover (We like to turn pictures from their coloring books into mini books for our lapbooks. They have really great history based coloring books.)
Homeschool in the Woods (The Time Traveler Series and the Activity Paks are the best pre-made lapbooks that I have seen, without a question. The Timeline figures from this site  are really great for lapbooks too.)
Books by Donald Silver at Amazon (These are sadly going out of print, but I think that they are really great.)
Books by Donald Silver on Currclick
Pockets by Evan-Moor on Currclick (These were not designed for lapbooks, but for the most part, they work great. Or you can make the pockets as described. It’s a similar idea to lapbooks.)
Pockets by Evan-Moor on Amazon

This is not an exhaustive list of links. Most of these links contain more links for you to follow and will give you many ideas. These are just my favorites.

Happy Lapbooking!

Human Body Unit & Lapbook

prayingmother

We have been studying about the human body for several weeks. Our core book or spine has been the book The House We Live In. It is an older book (written in early 1900’s) that includes information not only about the body but how to keep it healthy. I really appreciated this approach. We have an amazing machine called our body and keeping it in good running condition is so very important.

Here is a quote from the back of that book that I thought was good: “Parents should seek to awaken in their children an interest in the study of physiology. From the first dawn of reason the human mind should become intelligent in regard to the physical structure. We may behold and admire the work of God in the natural world, but the human habitation is the most wonderful. It is therefore of the highest importance that among the studies selected for children, physiology occupy an important place. All children should study it. And then parents should see to it that ptractical hygiene is added.”

Besides this book we used: First Encyclopedia of the Human Body by Usborne so that we could see pictures as we learned about the body. We did a few experiments from: Usborne Book of Science Activities Vol. 3. We also had a few older books that had been given to us that we enjoyed: You and Your Body by Usborne and Time Life Human Body.

Human Body and Health Books

We also watched several Moody Science Classics in conjunction with our studies including: Red River of Life and Windows of the Soul as well as the The Wonders of God’s Creation: Human Life. We also found some really great online videos and animations. Please see my posts about the heart and circulatory system and the respiratory system for those references. I found most of these links by looking up the subject matter on Wikipedia and scrolling to the bottom of the page and opening up all of the external links. One of the ones we really enjoyed on the brain was by the University of Washington, called Brain Works.

Now for the lapbooks. These lapbooks were a big project, we worked on them for several weeks along side of our learning. Most of our ready-made printables came from Easy Make & Learn: Human Body. It has really fun printables in it, such as a muscle that flexes. (See photo below.)

Muscle & Five Senses Extension

Here are pictures of the kids with their lapbooks.

Zippy with Human Body Lapbook

Zippy with Human Body Lapbook 2

JDBoy and Lapbook

JDboy and Lapbook

A couple close-ups of their covers

Human Body Lapbook Cover Human Body Lapbook Cover

We got the pictures on their covers from searching on Life photo archive hosted by Google. And we cut the letters out with our Wishblade that we just got. That was fun. It’s also the only successful thing I’ve done with it so far.

As you can tell, these lapbooks are very full. We spent several weeks on this project. I invite you too look at all of the pictures on flickr! to see the different books for each subject that we covered. (Scroll down for links to the flickr! sets.)

Here’s a slide show of JD Boy’s Human Body Lapbook:

Created with flickr slideshow.

Click here to see JD Boy’s Human Body Lapbook on Flickr!

Here’s a slide show of Zippy’s Human Body lapbook.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Click here to Zippy’s Human Body Lapbook on Flickr!

Thanksgiving Lapbooks

prayingmother

I’m finally getting our Thanksgiving Lapbooks posted on here. Thanksgiving came at the right time this year! We had just finished studying Jamestown so studying about the Pilgrims was the next chronological thing.

The books we read on this subject were Squanto And The Miracle Of Thanksgiving, Stories of the Pilgrims, The Thanksgiving Story and we continued reading This Country of Ours.

The books we got most of our printouts from for our lapbooks were History Pockets, Life in Plymouth Colony and Easy Make and Learn Projects: The Pilgrims, the Mayflower and More. We got one printout from daniellesplace.com and we used some of the timeline figures from Amy Pak. We also used some stickers that we picked up at Michael’s in the scrapbook section.

Here is Zippy and her Thanksgiving Lapbook:


Be sure to check out her whole set of pictures on Flickr as she has some really neat pop-ups in this lapbook that she did a really great job on. You can see her set by clicking here.

Now here is John Deere Boy and his Thanksgiving Lapbook:

We hope that you will be able to take the time to see his pictures, at least his interactive map on Flickr. You can do that by clicking here.  He is very fortunate to have had his lapbook displayed on the Thanksgiving Lapbook lens on Squidoo by Jimmie.

And because I know somebody is dying to know what his shirt says, since it shows out from under his lapbook, I will tell you. It says: "When it comes to education, there’s no school like home." We got it at our homeschool convention last summer.

Pocahontas & John Smith Lapbook

prayingmother
These lapbooks were simple, but they were especially fun because the children came up with what they wanted in them themselves. I, of course, had to help, but I let them design them and choose everything themselves. We just searched in Google images for most of the clipart and we had fun. (Unless noted artwork was from Google images.)

The books that we read on the subject were This Is Our Country, Pocahontas by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire, What If You’d Been at Jamestown? and The Double Life of Pocahontas by Jean Fritz.

Here is the cover of John Deere Boy’s (age 5) lapbook. It is a picture that he colored out of the Pocahontas coloring book by Dover Publications.

The inside:

His map: (from knowledgequestmaps.com)

Jamestown book cover: (from US History Little Books: Famous Places)

The inside of his Jamestown book is a photo of him holding the 3-D model that he made of Jamestown. (From Homeschool in the Woods. I can’t promise that link will always work as it was for the Jamestown anniversary.)

All of the rest of his mini-books were accordion style. Here is the one on John Smith. (The pictures in this were taken from the Pocahontas coloring book by Dover Publications.)

His book on Chief Powhatan:

His book on the Powhatan Indians:

Last but not least, is his book on Pocahontas. It is long. (I hope it fits on the screen.) He found several pictures to put in it. He carefully put them all in chronological order.

This is a drawing that he did on the back of his lapbook. It is a whole story, so it doesn’t mean so much if you can’t hear him explain it. Zippy says that he draws like he tells stories. You’d just have to hear him tell you the story of what is going on in this picture. He’s only five, but he’s a consummate story teller. It is the story of Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life.


If you’d like to see his whole set on Flickr! click here.
Now for my 8-year old’s: I wanted to make sure that she had some copywork in hers, so she designed it knowing that prerequisite. If you’d rather see the set on Flickr! click here.

Her cover: (She drew the pictures herself of Pocahontas rescuing John Smith.)

  Her lapbook layed open:

Her shaped book on the starving time. (Sorry it is hard to read those glitter pens that she likes so much. It says, "When Jamestown was starving, Pocahontas brought food and corn. She saved them from starving to death." )

Her book about John Smith: (The cover and the piece pasted on the inside were from the History Pockets, Colonial America.)

Her map showing where Jamestown is located:

Her Jamestown book (from US History Little Books: Famous Places) and her note on the bottom explaining why she put beads all over her lapbook.

Inside of the Jamestown book with picture of her holding the craft she made from Homeschool in the Woods.

Her book on "Pocahontas, the Indian Princess": (The inside picture is from the Pocahontas coloring book by Dover Publications.)


Her book about Pocahontas’ wedding: (Picture on the inside is again from the Pocahontas coloring book by Dover Publications.)


Thanks for looking!