We learned about the history of St. Patrick's Day. Live & Learn Press has a free lapbook you can make with your kids to learn all about the reason behind the holiday. We learned all about St. Patrick and his life as well as Irish culture. There are lots of mini books, but you can pick and choose what you would like to use for different age levels.  Here is the one my son did.

To end our study went to see the St. Patrick Day Parade they had in town. My son had a fun time.  He was pointing out the things we learned about as he watched different floats go by. Yes we wore green that day. It was not because of "good luck". We just didn't want to be the odd balls in the crowd of people with their green attire .

We ended our Christmas season with a mini unit on the 12 Days of Christmas.  This was an interesting study.  I found out this is not talking about the actual 12 days prior to Christmas.  It's funny how you can learn a song in your childhood and not know the real meaning of it.   You can find some nice worksheets for this here.  Here is the lapbook we made to go along with our study.

You can find great ideas and mini books for this from Lapbook Lessons and Homeschool Share.

Another mini unit we did during Christmas was on the Nativity.  You can find great worksheets for it here.  We also made this lapbook to go along with it.  I would like to give credit to the creator of it, but I can't remember where I got it from.  If anyone recalls the website, please let me know .

During the Christmas season we try to go easy on the work load to more fun activities as we learn about the "True" meaning of Christmas. We worked on a little mini unit study on Christmas Symbols.  You can find some great worksheets here.  We also made this lapbook to go with it. 

The mini books we used came from Lilliput Station and Lapbook Lessons.

My son enjoyed learning about how we go about electing a new president.  Playing Presidential tic-tac-toe was a great way to get through the night while waiting for the final results.  He liked being the elephant because he said they are stronger.  Of course I got stuck being the donkey whether I wanted to or not.  Here are pictures of his lapbook. 

The cover is a picture of a man at a voting booth.  In this lapbook we have pictures of the candidates. My son learned all about who can vote, political slang.  He even had a button he colored and wore all week.  He really enjoyed being able to vote in the mock elections at Curr click.

He also read and colored a book called "Tommy for President".  Other things you see are pictures of all the 43 presidents and our president elect as well as pictures of him keeping the score as each state was called.

The printables for this lapbook came from homeschooling.about.com, homeschoolshare, and Learning pages.

It is a double lapbook so we used 2 file folders glued together.  The ideas came from the Notebooking2Learn yahoogroup.  It is in the math section of the files.

My hubby designed the cover for this lapbook.  In it you will see mini booklets that tells what a multiplicand, multiplier, factor, and product is, multiplication flash cards for each of the family facts, skip counting, tab books for each of the multiplication facts, facts in their own community, and multiplication wheels for each of the multiplication facts.

 I also made some other mini books out of blank templets I had.  I wish I were as creative as those who are skilled in making these.  I haven't been doing this very long so in time I know I will .

During our study about Fall we also decided to learn about Sunflowers. I didn't find much about sunflowers to make this lapbook.  Hopefully we will have more to add to it in the future.  Several of the templates and came from Teacher Book Bag.

Here is a layout of all we did along with some sunflower clipart I found. The petals on here has all the nutritious vitamins we get from sunflowers.

My son learned the life cycle of a sunflower, used a map to color the states where sunflowers are planted, and did a worksheet that has all the ways sunflowers are useful to us.

My son learned all about Fall and leaves.  We will eventually be putting this lapbook into a notebook with the leaves we collected along with their descriptions.  So here are pictures of what we did....

He did several coloring sheets and learned some poems about leaves.

     We talked about how the weather gets cooler in the Fall.

    The little books from Enchanted Learning were of great use in our study. There were little stories about "Changing Seasons" and "Fall". 

Inside of the orange pocket is a puzzle we got along with some other neat printables from homeschoolingabout.com  .

We made a double lapbook.  The ideas and templates came from Teacher Book Bag, Live & Learn Press and Homeschoolshare.

We designed the cover out of green construction paper and a printout I found in a file I have.  Things you will see throughout this lapbook is how an apple tree looks through each season (He learned the seasons in French and spanish also), apple sayings, varieties of apples, apple fractions, and an apple book with some apple facts, some of his apple worksheets he did, the apple poem he made up, apple pie sequencing cards, and a story book about apples.  We also kept the seeds from different kinds of apples we ate.  There is also a game called "Collect the Apples", a Mr. Apple Head, the life cycle of an apple tree, ways we use apples, and a recipe with the process for making applesauce. 

When you flip it over the next part is his Johnny Appleseed lapbook.  Inside of the lapbook you will see all the information he learned about Johnny Appleseed.  He learned how Johnny Appleseed showed kindness, a timeline of his life, a map of places he traveled to plant apple trees, with the states colored, apples with our vocabulary words inside of them, apple copy work, his estimate of how many seeds in an apple before I cut it opened, a math book with the instructions on how to make an apple pie, apple tasting test, and sequencing cards for an apple tree.  He labeled the apple parts, and did an apple tasting survey as well as sequencing cards for the life cycle of an apple tree.

For Johnny Appleseed's birthday we celebrated by drinking apple juice with our breakfast, eating apple slices with PB&J sandwiches for lunch, and having apple pork chops with wild rice, and steammed broccoli for dinner.