Friday, March 21, 2008

Science Lapbooks...

I have fallen in love with lapbooking (which is a trademarked name). Lapbooking is where you discover a subject, often in science but can be any subject (I have seen alphabet ones as well as state ones). You study that subject until you get a deeper understanding of it. For example, we just finished a body systems lapbook. In this we did various different activities about the systems (you can get complete lapbook layouts from places like HandsofaChild.com or you can put them together yourself with information and free lesson plans online). Once the kids have completed the activities and various print out pages on the subject, then you assemble your book. It is really simple, starting with a file folder...
1) open it up, 2) fold the opened edges in until they meet in the middle (looks like a window shutter now) and 3) if you want you can go beyond this and tape/glue another piece as a fold down flap. 4) you simply attach with glue or tape the work outs and things like that, maybe a vocabulary list, pictures you have found on the subject, whatever. You let them have fun and put it all together. These books are great for learning but also become great for portfolios as well as keepsakes to have down the road. Also, whenever they want, they can pull them back out and refresh their memory on that subject.
Just Google 'lapbook' and you can see wonderful examples, plus I would like to take pics of ours to share with you all in the future.
What I was going to say though is that lapbooking is amazing. Because your kids are learning through this hands on process it seems to stick for them better. My son saw something the other day and said 'Look mom, this is like our mouth and our esophagus' (and he's only 6). It amazed me that he had remembered this because he usually is so busy, as all boys are, that I'm not really sure if he's paying attention sometimes. :)

2 comments:

Trilynn said...

I would love to see some pictures of the lapbooks. I have heard about them but never actually seen one done. You did one on the human body? Do your children know the skeletal bones, muscles ect? We got a musical cd called Lyrical Life Science Vol.3-The Human Body. It has all kinds of cute songs set to a jazz tune for the kids to learn to identify parts of the body.

Autumn Leavz said...

I need to take some and post. I might try to do that today. Ours aren't those professional polished ones that you see on other sites, but I try not to be so particular with them (because that seems to take the fun out of them).
We didn't go too in depth yet with the human body one because of their ages. I tried to keep it somewhat simple and just discuss the systems and what they do and parts of the system, etc. This one was our best one yet though. He have done the human body, forest habitats (which was very simple), and the 5 senses last year. I got some from hands of a child and they are a lot more in depth. They just didn't have a solar system which is what ds says he wants to learn about right now. So after the solar system one, we'll move on to the others that I got (gravity, animal classification, weather, etc).
I'll upload those pics soon though. :)