Someone asked me in a comment from another post how I chose to scrapbook the Five in a Row titles rather than lapbook.  Well, I don't know that I ever decided anything!  We have never done lapbooks, although since we started scrapbooking they don't seem like the impossible project anymore.  This site will show a sample of a lapbook if you aren't sure what I am talking about.  Basically, scrapbooking, notebooking, lapbooking, etc are simply ways of presenting information learned in a unit study.  We scrapbook because we saw others' scrapbooks and we liked them.  You can be sure you rarely (if ever) see an original idea on this blog!

For our scrapbooks, I bought Rachel and Mary Evelyn a 10x10 spiral bound scrapbook from the craft section in Wal-Mart.  I think they were something like $5 for an 80 page book.  Keep in mind that when I post pictures, I let them do the arranging and various little projects themselves.  And my girls are wonderful, but they are NOT perfectionists!  They are into slapping some glue on that baby and moving on!  They love to go back and look through their books though.  They are proud of their work and will show you if you come by the house.    Also keep in mind, that we do other projects or activities that just can't go in a lapbook.  Mary Evelyn and I made lemonade cookies this week to go with her book (lentil) and Rachel and I did a science experiment involving hot and cold air, a 20 oz bottle, and a balloon.  Neither was exactly scrapbook-able, though I suppose we could have taken pictures and written a little summary of what we did.  Maybe another time...

For the first two weeks of school, Rachel's book was The Pumpkin Runner.   We enjoyed this book a lot, our first from volume 4 of Five in a Row.  We learned a bit about Australia.  Some of her lessons included learning about the globe: latitude, longitude, the equator and prime meridian, and the hemispheres.  She wrote a story using several vocabulary words from the story.  Her scrapbook page is pictured below.

The green paper opens up like this:

Mary Evelyn's book last week was Lentil by Robert McCloskey.  She had fun playing her own harmonica, though I couldn't get her to play it in the bathtub like Lentil did in the book.  She wants to take harmonica lessons now.    She also loved using charcoal to draw and learned that this was the medium Robert McCloskey used for the illustrations.  She also learned a little about Ohio (the setting) and the elements of a story.  Below the picture of the Lentil pages are her pages from the first week's book, The Finest Horse in Town.  (We still need to finish this page!)

And here is Mary Evelyn with her new harmonica.