Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Lapbooks

Last week and this week have been "grace weeks" in school due to travel and sickness. School has gone on, just at a slightly more relaxed pace. One of the great things about homeschooling is that illness doesn't necessarily mean the learning stops. If we have to take a sick day it's because we are really sick!

Today I spent several hours making our first lapbooks with the kids. Elizabeth made one about butterflies and Silas wanted to do ants. Sarah glued miscellaneous pictures and papers to cardstock and she is so pleased with her "lapbook" too. I have no idea if we did it "right" and I'm sure there are as many ways to lapbook as there are people who do it. If you've never heard of it before, here is a YouTube video that shows more. (I just realized that the examples on the video are butterflies and ants. My kids saw the video so I guess that is where they got the ideas. But it didn't sink in till now. Funny!) I know a lot of people invest a lot of money in lapbooking kits, but I honestly don't see why you can't make your own with a bit of creativity.

The kids loved it, but it was actually really stressful for me, I suppose for the same reasons I don't scrapbook (time, mess, perfectionism...). And also I found myself saying about 5 million times, "Sarah, don't touch the scissors. Sarah, don't touch the glue. Sarah, leave the paper alone. Sarah, get off the table." She wasn't really being naughty, just curious and wanting to join in what we were doing. But a 2-year-old with scissors and a glue stick is just scary.

Anyway, Billy has the camera so I'll have to wait to show pictures till tomorrow.

5 comments:

Jen said...

We have glue, glitter and scissors on the list of "controlled substances" in our house. I almost thought of writing out a plan "What to do if the children find the glue.." for the babysitter! There's a blog post in there somewhere...

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the YouTube link!!!

Arizona Mama said...

I just started hearing "lapbook" everywhere. Now I know what they are talking about! Doesn't look like something we are going to be doing. Maybe if the kids were smaller...Nah! *grins*

Charity Grace said...

LOL, controlled substances! I laughed out loud!

Christina, the sound isn't working on my computer, so you probably got more out of it than I did. But I still found it educational.

Gina, I am not sure it's going to become part of our routine either. I am a simple person. If we are going to spend a lot of time on something artsy it will probably be their nature journals.

Donetta said...

Wow those lap books are too cool. We have some things similar. Those are wonderful!