Valerie is a born and raised Southern California girl. She is married and a stay-at-home mother to three wonderful blessings. Before her calling to homeschool, she wrote for public television, taught kindergarten, and was a live-in Nanny. She is currently Moderator of an International Yahoo GroupJust4homeschoolfamilies, The Heart Of The Matter online magazine; as well as Senior Editor of an monthly newsletter Words Of Encouragement.
For my post on our second grade project and why we chose Bee's as our subject, please click here. We had such a great time trying to become creative with our lapbook this year. It seems that with each passing year, it is getting harder to find something that wont seem babyish or to simple for them to do. Of course, with language arts as a plus for writing projects a lapbook seems to still interest my little second grader. He really likes his book. He looks through it often and even has shown it to his friends. He was able to draw some bees, color them and cut them out. That's just for the cover (pictured above). Then, the inside lapbook material was provided by another mom at Homeschoolshare.com/ . If you are thinking about trying a lapbook, be sure to check out this great resource. There are even lapbook communities that you can join for ideas. Here are some other photos for our BEE project.
The SNAIL Project
For our 5th grade project, my son chose to study snails. You can read in more detail about our report material and how we incorporated language arts into this study - click here. Snails were fun to study. I will never look at that green stuff that flows out of the shell after you step on it the same ever again! This report took a couple of weeks because I decided to find a lapbook to do on the subject, too. He really enjoyed this. In fact, he is still working on a little comic strip to add and a poem. So, know that the lapbook isn't complete in this photo... but it looks good so far! Can you see the snail hiding on the cover?
I had plans to actually construct clay models of both projects, and we still might, but only if we have time. With the summer quickly approaching (100 degree CA weather this past weekend), we are finding it hard to concentrate on anything but our slip-n-slide and trips to the beach. However, if we do find time to do those clay models, I'll be sure to post those photos, too!!!
