Lap books

I love lap books. They are such a great way to combine everything a child has learned about a subject into one place. And they are so cool when they are done...flaps that open, little books to look at, all the little hidden things that need to be explored. I know there are many companies that offer all the makings for lap books on different subjects, but I've always enjoyed helping my children make each little booklet themselves. The lap books may not look quite as nice, but I think my children learn a lot more. Plus, they can honestly say they made it all themselves. The other thing I love about them is how each book can be tailored to the age and ability of each child. As a group we can be working on the same subject, but the older children are asked to do more than the younger ones. We've been making the little booklets and pictures that went inside for the past couple of weeks and today was assembly day. Here are A., P., TM, and D. all busily working on putting the books together:

And here is a picture of the four lap books all assembled:

You can sort of get a sense of how they open. Each is made out of file folders and has multiple pages. A. and P.'s have more pages than the boys' because they had more written work to include.

So, what's next? Well, we're going to continue with our study of geography, having covered the basics of how the world itself is put together. Our next stop is Holland. It is the setting of the book, The Wheel on the School (highly recommended), which is our current lunch time read aloud. It's a wonderful book about a group of school children who work to bring storks back to their village. There's so much we can do...build dikes in the backyard, draw tulips (maybe even go to a tulip festival), wooden shoes.... We'll probably also cover storks and other migrating birds as well. I'm already thinking that since storks migrate from Africa, that that will be the next stop in line.