Last week we were discussing animal classification, and on Friday I had both Rylan and Cale choose an animal they wanted to do a project on. Rylan chose a Brittle Star and Cale chose a Hermit Crab. Sunday we cleared out the library on all the books on invertebrates, ocean life, crustaceans and echinoderms. They both wanted to do a lapbook, but we did it a little different than we have in the past, since this was supposed to be their projects. I read most of the books to them of course, and helped find internet pictures and resources, but as far as the lapbooks, I wanted the majority of the work to be theirs. The first thing I did was make up a set of Animal Reasearch Questions, based on the information I wanted them to find and the questions we all came up with together during our brainstorming session. The questions are relatively simple, since my boys are young: animal type, habitat, parts, food, etc...You can find them here under What kind of animal is it? along with the files for the Animal Classification Box. We read through the questions, then started to read in our books. My oldest used the index and table of contents himself. They dictated notes to me when we came across answers to some of the questions. Then I gave them a basket of premade mini-books. I basically just used all my scraps from previous lapbooks and folded them in half or triangles or whatnot. Not templates or printing. So when they were ready to start they would pick a question, pick and book and answer. They each helped find a page full or pictures of the internet to glue in their books. My 5 yr old needed more prompts and spelling help. He dictated more. My 7 yr old did almost all the work himself. I think I wrote 1 question for him. Cale finished his yesterday and is vry proud- it is completely him- right down to the backwards and upside down cover (which is on the back). Rylan finished his up this morning. And he "presented" it to me when he finished. He used the book to help him but most of the facts he recalled; he was really interested in the basket star. Cale "presented" his to Paul this morning too. He needed a little more prompting for answers, but recalled most of the info too.
My 3 year old is obsessed with Diego. We've got books and 1 movie (b-day present) and he always picks Diego to watch when it's his turn to pick at their 30 min movie time. For a few weeks now he has been Diego. This is the first time any of my kids have pretended to be someone or something else for an extended period of time. So awhile back I was blog browsing and saw the Tot Books at Carisa's blog. I made up the Cars one for him, which he loved. So since the older boys are getting ready to do an animal lapbooks I thought I would work on one for him. Originally it was going to be small, but I wanted to add a bit more so the final product is a full file folder, but depending on the age of the child you could skip somethings if you wanted to make a Tot Book size.
It's fairly simle: pockets for upper and lowercase letters, shape tracing, beginning sounds, number 1-10 (with spanish words too), a simle maze and line drawing, a positional word book. He hasn't worked on it finished yet, but he discovered half the booklets last week and has been reading and counting with them all week. All files can be downloaded here .
***all images are copyrighted and can be found at Disney Clips. Files can be used for personal use only. TO view more Tot Books visit Carisa's site.
I picked something sort of easy for our first project. Something they would find fun, but incorporated some of the information they need to know: full name, address, phone numbers etc. Most of this was review for my 2nd grader but not quite memorized for my Kindergartener. I also wanted to introduce the concept of history in thier own lives before we jump into the history of everything else.
The minibooks/parts included:
A self portrait
My Time Line, downloaded from somewhere but I can't remember where
a family tree- I c/p a clipart tree and drew the boxes I needed in Word
Likes and Dislikes
My Family
Measurements accordian book
graph of the above measurements
a person shape book taken from an Evan Moor Theme Pocket book, downloaded from Googlebooks. Name, age, height, right/left handed, boy/girl, etc
Most of the books were made by me. It was pretty simple. But they enjoyed working on it.
With the collection of our Cabbage Butterfly caterpillars a few weeks ago we have had butterflies on the mind. We ended up with 5 all together....3 collected as chrysalises, one collected caterpillar and one that was tiny and newly hatched that hitched a ride on the leaf. The leaves lasted long enough for it to grow and form it's chrysalis....we are waiting on it still. The other 4 have popped out and flown away. And out of all 4 we have seen ZERO emerge. All but the first we could see the wings forming, we could see it loosening, but we missed them each time. One we checked every 5 minutes until I took a shower and Paul and the boys didn't check during those 20 minutes...it was out when I got out. This last one it was SO close. I set it next to Rylan while he was eating breakfast and not 2 minutes after he got up did we see it hanging there- wings still wrinkled. It's nice to hear them call these butterflies by their names now. All of them actually- on our butterfly bushes outside we have spotted Tiger and Black Swallowtail, Monarch and Painted Lady.
Since it is summer and I don't feel like being to creative we did a lapbook with no outside creativity on my part. All of it was from www.homeschoolshare.com it was a nice little lapbook and it was for fun, took no time at all, but it was enjoyed by all....
We finally finished this one!! It took a lot more work than I expected, and I am glad I went into the whole thing with a rough sketch of what I wanted to accomplish and where it would all go. I am also very glad I have kids who love to cut and glue! My goal was to have a sort of word book for the kids to use with their reading. As we were putting it together, my oldest was reading words to his 4 yr old brother while the 4 yr old read the words he could back, so I think it will accomplish my goal. I also plan to use it later if any particular group of words is causing trouble. Anyway, so here it is....
Here is what is inside (using 3 file folders)
The first small flap contains 5 pockets. 1 for each vowel. Each pocket has word cards for short CVC words.
the 2nd small flap has 6 minibooks made from word cards for the -ng and -nk words
The first large section is for the long A sounds: ea, ay, ei, ey, eigh, a_e and ai
The 3rd small flap has flaps for ar and or, along with a mini-poster for oy and oi
The 4th small flap has 3 pockets for the 3 pronunciations for -ed and words for "ea" with the short e sound
The 2nd large section has the long e sounds: e_e, e, ee, ei, ea, ie and ey/y. It also has the 3 "ch" sound and all of the "er" sounds
The 5th small flap has some of the silents: ph, wr, b, kn,gn and t
The 6th small flap has -ck and the voiced and unvoiced "th"
The 3rd large section has Long o sounds: oa, o, ow,oe, and o_e. And the "sh" sounds of sh, ti, si, ci
The 7th small flap has word card books fro au/aw and ow/ou
The 8th small flap has the 6 different pronunciations of -ough
The 4th large section has the long u sounds (and variations of it): u, ue, u_e, ui, ew, oo (and it's second pronunciation) aswell as contractions.
And the 5th large section, on the back, has the long I sounds: i, i_e, ie, y and igh. And -tch, -dge, wh and qu
Here are a few links to the online resources....the rest was all just me and Word.
oi/oy, au/aw ou/ow, long I, r-controlled and other vowel combinations were found here, and I used this site to print some of the word cards. The blank templates were from Homeschool Helper then cut and pasted into Word so I could edit them.
So here is my 4.5 yr old's finished short I book....
And here's a couple of the links to where I got the printables....the word wheel, the "words to write". matching word families ice cream cones, the easy reader/cut and paste, matching, the i words in the pocket and the pirate coin game(scroll down to the bottom and download).
We started our weather unit this past week....most of it was based upon the requirements for the Cub Scouts Weather belt loop and pin. My 6 yr old worked on this lapbook to pull all his stuff together in one place:
The first side flap has a circle folded into fourths with his picture of the water cycle. Also it has our vocab words- I cut out cloud shapes and he glued them on craft sticks and I wrote the words, he looked them up in the glossary or dictionary and read the definition (dictated for me to write)
The middle is covered by his cloud page. Nothing beats cotton to make clouds! We made 6 different flaps, he wrote the name and created the cloud and then we read about what types of weather are associated with each to write on the inside. Under the clouds: There is a cloud shaped book about lightning and what causes it, a 'ways we use water 'mini book, a cloud shaped, pop-up rainbow he drew and how they are made. And a how accurate are forecasters minibook.
The other side flap has a copywork page- I wrote out some weather saying and he copied them below. And our weather journal for a 6 day period. We recorded rain, temp and wind.
The back consists of the Billy, Maria and the Thunderstorm coloring book. They have a few different titles on various weather situation- you can find them here. The extreme weather book was a cut-and-paste from the Owlie Skywarn's Weather Book. and a venn diagram comparing tornadoes to hurricanes.
A lot of the full paage sized documents I scaled down in the printer options to print 2-4 pages/sheet instead of 1 page/sheet so they would fit better in our book. I have another to share....my 4yr old requested another "reading lapbook" as he put it.....so we did one today on the short I sound. He didn't finish one part- the writing word cards and didn't want me to take pictures of it until he did that. So maybe I will share that one tomorrow.
I was feeling like I haven't been working with my 4 yr old enough. He is on the brink of learning how to read. He can sound out words pretty well. And loves to "read" to himself. He has a ton of books memorized and I think he will be they type of kid who wants to read real books. He can read a couple of the easy readers (ie. BOB books and the ones that came with his SSR&W) but it goes like this..."Mat sat ." but he reads: "Mat sat on a blanket at the beach." He will read the words if I slow him down, but he doesn't care much for the simplified text. So last night I threw this lapbook together, and I while my oldest played the ABSeas fishing game with the 2 yr old. We sat down and worked on it. Didn't take very long, he already could do most of this...but I was suprised how well he sounded out the harder words like acrobat.
I got the materials for it from: Hubbard's Cupboard, Carl's Corner and here are the word family ice cream cones which he really liked. A few things were from my personal collection or I made them myself.
My son picked this one. I showed him my collection of files and lapbooks on my computer and he picked which one. Of course his deciding factor was not that he is terribly interested in birds, it was that he wanted to do a book using 3 folders.The Bird Lapbook was a freebie from the Homeschool E-store that I got awhile back, technically it is for older kids- 4th grade or so....so I skipped some of the mini-books and replaced them with other bird related books that were a little more his level. We also did not use the suggested layout, we just stuck them where we wanted and how they fit nicely....he wanted it FULL. I also decided to try something new this time around. First we cut and glued and put the whole thing together, then we went in and answered questions, read books, etc. And to tell the truth it is not all the way finished yet. We come and go from it, eventually it will be all done....but since it looks done I am going to go ahead and post it. Personally I like doing the books individually and then at the end coming in and putting it all together. I can see doing the book first for skills-based lapbooks....like an addition or multiplication. Put it all together then come back around to answer the questions. But for our next one (which will be one of Weather) I think I will go back to my old way of doing things.....
Here is my son's lapbook that we made along with the Human Body Unit we did last week. He loves to see these as finished products and says this is the best one so far (it is our 3rd). We did all these random books last week and then his favorite part today and yesterday- assembly and decoration.
I also let me 4 yr old make one....but his are simple books with no writing, more coloring, cutting and glue. But he likes to feel involved even though he doesn't quite have the attention span or writing skills for the more involved ones.
While I am on the subject of school work....My 6 yr old son, in first grade. Usually a reluctant reader and writer- well reluctant student in all....worked very hard on his first solo (well...almost solo) lapbook when we studied dinosaurs a few weeks back. I love to look at it. See his writing and thoughts.
Most of the resources for this book came from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/dinosaurs.htm with a few add ons from my collection of links and resources. He loves to show it off so I thought I would do just that....
