One of the things I enjoy doing with my girls is making lapbooks. In case you haven’t heard of lapbooks, they are a basically file folders, folded different ways and used to display various mini-books, cards, maps, timelines, or whatever else you want to use about a specific topic. Some people use lapbooks to display what they have learned about a topic. Others use the activities in it to learn about a topic as they assemble it. We’ve used them both ways in our homeschool, and either way they are a lot of fun and a great resource.
Here’s an example of a lapbook we did in Makaylah’s kindergarten year. We were doing Five in a Row, and were rowing Madeline – one of my favorites!
Front of the lapbook. This file folder has been refolded so the flaps open from the center.
Inside of lapbook. Clean hands and flag of france mini books, rhyming words and counting pockets.
The back of the lapbook is also usable space, and made a great place for this coloring page of the Eiffel Tower.
Lapbooks can be as simple or advanced as you want them to be. Some people add sheets of card stock or even another file folder to their lapbook for extra space. Depending on the type of information you are trying to share, that can be useful! You can get really fancy with your mini book folding, or not. It’s sort of like scrapbooking!
Lapbooking can work for any learning style. For your kinesthetic learners, it gives them a chance to use their hands interacting with your material. Your visual learners will love another way to see the material. You can talk about things while you work for your auditory learner, or even listen to a related audio.
Lapbooks also help reinforce learning, because they put what you are learning about in a format your children will be excited to share. Our lapbooks have been pulled off the shelves many times to be shown to friends and family. And even now, two years after making this lapbook, it helps reinforce what we’ve learned, because my girls will get it down off the shelf and look through it again. Each time they do that, they see the Eiffel Tower, the flag of France, etc, and have another opportunity to learn.
If you are interested in getting started lapbooking, but don’t want to come up with all your material from scratch, there are a lot of great options on Currclick.com. Homeschoolshare.com also has a lot of free downloadable mini-books and other lapbook pieces.
Do you have any questions about lapbooking? Is it something you’ve used in your homeschool before? What topics and ages have you used it with?
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