Our First Lapbook

Lapbooking is a recent trend for homeschoolers. It's a way to put together all that you've done to learn about a certain subject in one place to use for review and so forth and I guess be able to hold it "on your lap". Ever since someone told me about it last summer I have been shying away from doing it. Anything that I don't understand or seems overwhelming, well, I just tend to avoid (ask my sister how many years it took me to learn how to use the popcorn popper she gave me). But after looking at other examples on the internet and coming upon a good topic that seemed conducive to lapbooking without me having to come up with too much extra on my part, we tried it out. Below is the result...

The subject: Farm Animals

This month we have been focusing on goats, cows & horses so when we finished, I put this together to remember our unit...

Above: Lapbook all closed up. Below: Opened up...

Above: Top left is a picture of a horse head that Alyssa drew, Top right are lift the flap information about the 3 types of farm animals that we actually studied. Alyssa told me what she remembered and I wrote it on the back of each picture. Bottom right is a scripture verse we talked about (would've been nice to memorize some of it but we didn't) and bottom left you can see part of the barn story Alyssa made. She drew pictures inside and told me her story which I wrote down about a farm.

Above: Top left is the Favorite Animal Chart Alyssa made on the computer - horse was the favorite animal followed by cows. Top right is the Farm Crossword puzzle I made for her to do. Bottom left, Counting by 10 barn dot-to-dot downloaded from www.kidscrafty.com and bottom center is farm animal babies and their mothers which I cannot remember where I downloaded that from...

Above: This is the back of the lapbook. I made a pocket to store the Farm animal puppets we had made on big popsicle sticks and I also put a picture she had colored. I got these from www.dltk-kids.com & www.clker.com.

Alyssa had no idea what I was talking about when I told her we were going to do a lapbook and I did pretty much put it together myself (after she did the work of course) but now that she's seen it she says she wants to do one for "every unit" we do. Not sure sure about that but we are moving on to wild animals so maybe we'll try another one out when we're done studying them.