Since seeing your daughter's American Girl lapbook, I'm extremely enticed!  I, too, have a 7 year old daughter who is crazy about the American Girls.  I would love to begin the series and work on the lapbooks together!  Reason for my email: I understand the lapbooks you made are from file folders?  From what I can tell you used 2 of them?  Do you attach the two together somehow?  How does it close up?  2 separate folders inside each other?  I'm fascinated with the process but would like to know a bit more before I attempt my first one!  I'd like to at least let my daughter THINK I know what I'm doing!  :)

Thanks so much for any information on the folding, attaching, etc concept of lapbooking!  I can see where it would be not only fun for my daughter but also a terrific teaching tool!

Mary

I thought there were probably other people that had the same questions, so I told her I would answer it here.  After wracking my brain over the best way to show the answer to Mary's questions I decided to put together a sample lapbook with red duct tape so it will be obvious how they are constructed.  Normally I use clear packing tape to put them together, which is why you can't see the tape in the pictures I post.

The first steps is to take a folder and open it flat on the table.  Then fold both sides into the middle and make it look like shutters on a window.

Once you have 2 folders folded into shutters as described above you can connect them like this:

Once you have the inside connected close your lapbook and reinforce the binding with tape like this:Remember normally you will be using clear packing tape. However, we have used color duct tape on the binding before if we have the right color.

How many of these can you connect? The most we have ever done is 5.  For most lapbooks we seem to use 3. 

How to fold them up for storage will kind of be obvious once you have your lapbook constructed.  It will just kind of fold in on itself the way it wants to! LOL

Another option for construction is to add flaps to either the top or bottom of your folder once it is shutter folded and connected to whatever folders you will attach it to. 

Here is a picture of a flap attached to the top:You will need a piece of tape on the inside.

And then fold it down and put another strip making a tape hinge of sorts.

You can also put these type of flaps at the bottom of the folder.We have some that have a flap on the top and the bottom of the same shutter folded folder.  We always make all our mini books first.  Then we lay them out and decide how many folder and flaps we will need in the construction phase of the lapbook.

I hope this information helps Mary!

Happy Homeschooling,

Jamin

P.S.  For some reason the blog template took out all my spacing on this post.  I really did make it look pretty before I posted it!  LOL  Sorry it looks so awful!