As part of getting myself and the boys in gear for the next school year, I have been searching the internet for learning activities related to our curriculum. One of these searches landed me on a page about making lapbooks, including a youtube video of a train lapbook. Erich watched this over my shoulder and said, "Mom! I really want to make one of those!" so off we went to try and figure out lapbooking.
The concept of lapbooking is a creative way for a student to review the material he has learned about a topic, or maybe about an individual book he's read. He puts together small booklets and cutouts that contain details about the topic and arranges and glues them into two or more file folders put together in book form. The end product sort of looks like an origami scrapbook.
Several vendors at this summer's convention displayed lapbook kits that they had published, with the contents already pre-printed or at least put on a CD to print. Then there were the lapbooks other vendors displayed made by real live homeschool children. These were amazing works of art and I wondered if my artistic boy would have the drive and patience to put one together.
Homeschoolshare.com offers tons of different pre-designed lapbooks, including the one we saw on the youtube video about trains. The boys and I worked on this for a couple of afternoons and finally finished their books yesterday. They are so proud of how the books turned out that they both insisted on sleeping with them last night! ha ha Erich has thumbed through his book so much in the past two days that I had to take these pictures before the thing fell apart. So, I think it's safe to say that we will be lapbooking a bit of what we learn in school this year.
