A couple of years ago I heard a homeschool friend mention that her kids were enjoying Lapbooking Ancient Egypt.
Lapbooking?
So I pulled her aside to asked her to explain. Ever since that day our family has loved making lapbooks. They are a way for a child to scrapbook in a folder whatever unit or topic of study she is working on. Any child of any age can utilize lapbooking and almost any subject under the sun can be made into a lapbook.
What is a lapbook, you ask? It's a portfolio that you can customize to show what your child has studied, be it a book, a country, and unit study, or anything. Think of a book report, but funner. Lapbooks can be on just about any topic and can include anything that can be displayed on paper. For example, we used lapbooks to pull together our unit studies on continents. Our lapbooks contained colored flags, recipes, vocabulary words, charts, and more.
The wonderful thing about lapbooks is the way the serve to help kids learn and remember what they have studied.
To make your own lapbook, you will need:
- manilla file folder
- scissors
- glue
- paper
- markers/crayons, etc
- paper scraps, yarn, brass fasteners, etc.
Let me first show you some photos of how to fold a basic lapbook. Start with a file folder opened up.
Next, fold one side in to the middle crease.
Here are some photos of lapbooks my kids have made.
This is the first lapbook we made and was done a few years ago when we studied PA history. As you can see we cut it into the shape of PA and on the front labled the capital and a few other cities.
Inside we have our state flag, info on William Penn, and other things we studied.
One year we studied the Middle Ages and we got the idea for this castle-shaped lapbook from a friend. You can see the the pics that the drawbridge is velcroed on. The kids loved this lapbook and kept thinking of more ideas for info that they could put in it.
Opened up you can see all the great stuff that they did. In the lower left-hand corner is a photo of a cardboard castle the all the kids helped to make. They each wrote a princess or knight story for their writing projects, found out what foods people ate back then (in brown triangle fold), and, in red, you can see that they researched the Feudal System and placed info into flaps.
There are many resources on the web pertaining to lapbooking. For free lapbooks and tutorials, go to homeschoolshare.com or lapbooklessons.com
You can purchase lapbook kits at currclick.com or homeschoolinthewoods.com or handsofachild.com. The kits are sold by subject. Currclick also offers a few free lapbooks to try. There is also a great book called The Ultimate Lap Book Handbook. You can buy it at tobinslab.com.
To read more about lapbooking, click here: lapbooking are Lapbooking Made Easy
There are as many ideas for lapbooks as there are hands to make them. If you take your preschooler to the zoo, come home and paste photos of animals, a map of the zoo, a funny memory or favorite animal, and zoo stickers and you have a great little science lapbook.
Teaching your youngster the alphabet? Why not help him make a lapbook for every letter? For A he can cut out pictures of things that begin with that letter.
For older students a lapbook can make a great book report. If you daughter is reading a book about Laura Ingalls she can do historical research and find photos to print that show other real pioneers in daily life. She can copy pioneer recipes, color styles of clothing, detail historical happenings at the time Laura Ingalls lived, etc. The ideas are limitless.
Teaching your youngster the alphabet? Why not help him make a lapbook for every letter? For A he can cut out pictures of things that begin with that letter.
For older students a lapbook can make a great book report. If you daughter is reading a book about Laura Ingalls she can do historical research and find photos to print that show other real pioneers in daily life. She can copy pioneer recipes, color styles of clothing, detail historical happenings at the time Laura Ingalls lived, etc. The ideas are limitless.
Take some time and peruse the websites to look at other photographs of student lapbooks to see even more ideas for making your own. And most importantly, have fun with it. After all, that's sort of the point!