Fall Lapbook

Last week I shared with you our very first Lapbook for this year about Pumpkins.  At teh end of that post  I promised to share our next lapbook about Fall.

Well, We STILL have not completed our Fall lapbook!  Don't get me wrong, we have been working on it.  We have most (actually everything but one) of the individual books and cards etc. completed.  Nothing is put together in the actual lapbook though.  Such is life.  We will put it together, it's just not happening today!


That doesn't mean I am not going to share our resources though!  I just don't have any nice pictures to go with this post.  To be perfectly honest, I probably will not ever get to posting them either.  Let's face it, it's already time to move on to the next project so this one will be soon forgotten - until my daughter pulls it out to review, but by then "Fall" will be irrelevant. Just being honest!  :)

Anyhow, I will still let you know what things we did for this lapbook.  I'll let you know where I plan to place everything, but I'm sure you can figure out a layout if you choose to do a Fall lapbook with your little ones!

For the front cover I plan to attach a leaf collage we made together.  We live in Florida, so unfortunately,  we don't get to see many Fall colors in the leaves (By the way, I am originally from up North, and Fall is my FAVORITE season, so this is tough for me to deal with!), but we were able to find a few red, brown and yellow leaves.  We took the leaves and pressed them between two sheets of wax paper and ironed.  Pretty neat way to preserve the leaves!


On the inside left flap I will attach a small book about Fall.  For this book I copied a poem by Dianne Waggoner that I found in The Giant Encyclopedia of Theme Activities for Children 2 to 5 on page 146.  I assembled a small book from blank paper and wrote out the poem, one line per page leaving plenty of empty space below each sentence.  Then, I read the poem to Princess and she drew pictures for each page.  It's really cute!


Below the Fall Poem book, I plan to add the Leaf Shape Bingo game that I found in Toss and Learn Games Science pages 15-18.  You're supposed to attach the "call cards" to the sides of a rolling die, but we just mixed them up on the floor face down and played that way. I had my daughter practice some handwriting with this as well.  She had to look at the call cards, find the matches on the game cards, then write the name of the leaf below the picture.  I kept them all as cards so that we could place them into a pocket envelope in the lapbook.


In the center I plan to attach two pages.  One page is a maze (my daughter loves mazes - she's really good at them too!)  that I found at DLTK (♥ this site!!).  I printed out maze #4 in black and white.  Princess solved the maze (in about 20 seconds) and then colored it in.


The second page in the center of our Fall lapbook will be another Draw Write Now activity.  We used Draw Write Now Book 2, page 40.  I really love these books!  I like to use it for copy work in place of repetitive writing of A A A A A (you get the picture!) Plus, Princess loves to draw and this is a great way for her to learn a bit more.


On the right hand flap we will have Leaf matching cards in a pocket envelope.  I printed these from pages 8-10 of a free sample from the "Harvest Festival Project Pack" offered by Hands of a Child.  This is a similar to the Leaf Bingo we did, but oh well.


The lower right flap will have some new words we have learned along with their definitions.  I have laminated these so Princess can use a wipe-off marker to practice writing the words.  The definitions are on the back.  I chose the words mostly from books we read about Fall.


Some of the books we read were:

Why do Leaves Change Color? by Betsy Maestro

Let's Look at Fall by Sarah Schuette

I Know it's Autumn by Eileen Spinelli

How do you Know it's Fall? by Alan Fowler

It's Fall! by Linda Glaser

These are just a few of the books we read...there are much more!!

Even though we have not assembled this lapbook yet, we have actually already started our Thanksgiving Lapbook.  There is less than a week to go until Thanksgiving, so I'll be sharing our resources for this soon, but again we won't have it completed for me to show you  :(  Sorry about that!

We may be slow going getting these completed, but we are still enjoying making them!

But that is just one mom's opinion.

Have you made a lapbook about Fall with your kids this year?

Mind sharing with me??

Let me know your thoughts!

Pumpkin Lapbook

Last week I wrote about our new use of lapbooks for homeschooling.  Lapbooks are definitely not a new concept, not even for us.  This is the first time I am using them specifically for homeschooling.

Our first lapbook for this year was all about pumpkins.  My daughter is on a Kindergarten level so tried to find activities appropriate for her level.  Finding items to add to lapbooks can be a lot of work and research, but it is also fun to see all the possibilities.


Here is the lapbook I did with my daughter along with the resources used;

For the front cover, I had Princess write "My Pumpkin Lapbook" on a piece of pumpkin shaped lined paper.  Below her title she wrote her name and date. The pumpkin paper was from here. I printed the page out and Princess wrote  on it, colored it and then cut it out all on her own.

Front Cover

On the inside, we pasted on a pocket envelope to hold small cards that showed the life cycle of a pumpkin.  Princess colored all the stages of the life cycle and them cut them out.

Pumpkin Life Cycle

 She now can remove all the pieces and put them in order while she explains the different stages to me.  We used the sequence cards found here.

 However, there are also some great photos that you can use for this activity as well found here.   I used the black and white drawings mainly because it allowed more interaction through the coloring and cutting.

Below the life cycle pocket we did a simple sizing activity of five pumpkins.  Princess sorted them in order of smallest to largest and then pasted them onto the paper after coloring and cutting them out.

 In the middle of the lapbook,  Princess colored a picture of a pumpkin and practiced some writing from page 5 from this Pumpkin resource set.

There are tons of other pages at this same site for a Pumpkin Lapbook so look through all of them.

Under that page is a maze featuring Clifford found here.

 Below that is the poem "Five Little Pumpkins".  I printed that from page 9 and 10 found here.

As the site suggested, I laminated the page and the pumpkins, cut out the pumpkins and attached Velcro so Princess could remove and count them.

On the right hand side, Princess practiced her handwriting with some copy work and also learned to draw a pumpkin all on her own.  We used pages 34-35 of Draw Write Now book 2. 

Under that is an envelope with a Happy Pumpkin Puzzle.

This is a very simple puzzle for a Kindergartner, but I wanted to include it because it allowed Princess to work on her cutting skills.  She colored in the picture, then I laminated it and she cut out all the pieces.

On the very back, there is a spelling game.  I made a very crude envelope to store all the pieces.  This is Princesses' favorite part of the entire lapbook!  They are cute little pumpkins with pictures of simple CVC words.  The letters are cute little pumpkin seeds too! The printouts for this literacy game can be found here.

Looking back, I should have used cardstock for everything, not just the printouts!  I actually used construction paper for the envelope on the back as well as some of the background pages for hte activities to be glues on.  Through use over the last couple of weeks, these have begun to tear and fall out of the lapbook.  I need to use better quality stuff!!

When doing our lapbook, I actually placed one component of the lapbook into one of our workboxes each day.   So it took Princess about 9 days to complete all the activities.  On the 10th day, we constructed the actual lapbook.  Princess has reviewed this lapbook quite often since it's completion.

To accompany this lapbook we also read a few books about Pumpkins including:

From Seed to Pumpkin by Wendy Pfeffer

and The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons

We are currently working on a Fall lapbook and I will share those resources with you soon!  I think that lapbooks will continue to be a much enjoyed addition to our curriculum!

But that is just one mom's opinion.

Do you use lapbooks with your children?
What are you currently working on?

Let me know your thoughts!

Lapbooks

I am always looking for new ways to make homeschooling fun for my kids.  I had heard, years ago, about lapbooks and had even made one or two, but had actually forgotten about them.  I recently found some things in our homeschool file cabinet from a while back and it renewed my interest.

Now that Princess is on a Kindergarten to First grade level, I think these lapbooks could be much more interesting and useful! So I began researching them all over again.

Not sure what lapbooks are?  Well, lapbooks are a fun, creative way to organize all the details of what you are learning.  You basically make a a bunch of mini books on the topic of your choice and then assemble all of those books into one larger book that is made up of file folders.  This completed book is a great review tool as well.  Children can look through them and remember what they've learned.

Although we do use a curriculum for phonics and math, lapbooks are a great way to reinforce what those lessons are teaching.  Also, since I don't follow a set curriculum for other subjects, this is a great way to integrate Science, Social Studies and Art into our routine.

The best way to really get a good grasp on lapbooks is to see them.  There is a Lapbooking Flickr Group that has an amazing amount of awesome lapbooks to look at.

So far this year, we have only completed one lapbook.  We focused on Pumpkins.  We are beginning a lapbook on Fall now ( I know, a little late) and should have it completed in two weeks or so, depending on my daughter's pace.

As soon as I get my pictures organized, I'll share our Pumpkin lapbooks with you - complete with all the resources I used to put them together.

I'm going to try my best to share all of our lapbooks and the resources so you can try it if you want.

There are lots of great things about lapbooks.

• They can be customized to suit any level since you choose the materials. 
• It's a great way to utilize scarpbooking supplies and skills and get creative.  
• It's an awesome review tool when it's completed.  
• It works great with the Workbox system we are already using
• It allows you to cover multiple subject areas in one place
• It's a great addition to our portfolio, which will have to be evaluated at the end of the year

I very much enjoyed the creation of our pumpkin lapbooks and can't wait to share them with you!  I am excited to get started on our next lapbook about Fall!

But that is just one mom's opinion.

Have you used lapbooks?
What are you currently working on? Have any pictures to share?

Let me know your thoughts!