Thursday, April 03, 2008

New (to me) Homeschooling projects

We've completed now our second lapbook of the year. I never knew what lapbooks were really till this year. Sure I had heard of them, but it never registered with me what that really meant. I just ignorantly thought that I could never do those and they wouldn't be of any service anyway.

Boy was I wrong on that point. My friend Amy has been doing lapbooks for awhile and had even given me a sample lapbook with various folds for a model; but still I never ventured to do one. I mean, what good were they?

Then for history this year I bought Time Traveler's New World Explorers and Colonial Life. Both have lapbook projects to complete. Wow they are fun! Amy Pak is quite detailed oriented and certain of the lapbook projects were, in my opinion, more for show and not worthwhile in learning. But overall, it was fun and my kids really enjoyed doing them. They love looking at these books and showing people what they've done.

On the second lapbook, Colonial Life, we even omitted some of her projects and added our own. This gave my two oldest the confidence to create their very own lapbook of composers. Before we moved on too far in history, I wanted to go through some of the great composers that were living at this time, so we are covering with the help of the Great Composer series, Bach, Scarlatti, Handel, Beethoven, Hayden, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Mozart.

For those of you who like and use Five in A Row, there are lapbooks for those stories you can make. At this link here, there are all sorts of suggestions for how to lapbook, various templates for folds, even full lapbook project ideas.

So don't think you can't do them, if I can, you can. Go ahead, explore the link and try one. It is fun and a neat way for your kids to narrate their knowledge in a new, fun way besides just plain paper. The next one we'll do will be on our own state history using some of the suggestions from the above link.

As for the Time Traveler's series, they are good, but very time consuming. If your approach to homeschooling is immersion and unit studies, then make sure you check them out. Everything is included from copywork to artwork, to reading to projects, to cooking, etc. That isn't my approach, but I did enjoy doing these. There are more out, one now on The Revolution and then the early 19th century. But I won't use those this time, it would be overkill, we'll just go back to our "boring" way of reading and narrating, but we'll add some fun lapbooking things in from time to time.

So go on, go visit this site and start planning on what you'll have your kids complete a lapbook. You could even do one on their Catechism work and Bible Stories!

5 comments:

Karen said...

Thanks for reminding me of these. I attended a workshop many years ago on including lap books in homeschooling, but never got around to using them. I'll have to dig out my info and try to spice up our day. Would you consider posting pictures of your lap books for added inspiration? Karen

Kristi Heinz said...

Thanks for the site! I LOVED it. I love teaching by units and found some neat helpful stuff there! I could get lost there for hours.

If I am using lap books the same as you, there is a book called "Foldables". Have you used it? It is a great way to organize information, make creative study sheets for states/capitols, record vocabulary words, etc. Great fun!

Glenda said...

Sure Karen, I'll take some pictures. The two are mainly like the Time Explorers, but we did add and change some things, and the girls are still working on the composer lapbook, so once it is finished, I'll post pictures of all of them.

No Kristi I've not heard of foldables. I googled it and it looks quite similar to lapbooking. Have fun figuring out what you can use in your classroom!

Laura said...

I am looking foward to the pictures, too!

AmusedMomma said...

What fun!!!

Thanks for sharing.