Adventures in lapbooking

Lapbooking. It's a word I was vaguely familiar with, but had never considered incorporating in our homeschool. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically scrapbooking everything a student has learned on a particular topic in one folder. From what I can tell, there are really no rules, but plenty of fantastic ideas and examples can be found on the Internet. Let me say it again, "How DID we homeschool without the Internet?"

We are working this week on a unit study of football. We've done some fun activities and the boys are enjoying it. Somehow a link for lapbooking ended up in my in-box this morning. Before I knew it I was printing and planning for our football lapbooks. The boys spent hours researching and reading facts, cutting, coloring, organizing, writing and creating. At the end of the day, the consensus was unanimous - all three of my boys agreed it was the best day of homeschooling they had ever had. I think we'll be incorporating lapbooks more often!

Here are a couple of good links I found. If you've never checked out lapbooking, I would recommend it as a neat extension activity for anything you are currently studying. The possibilities are endless.

Lapbooking on Squidoo - this one is a great jumping off point. I was able to get the basics and show the boys some good examples of what we were trying to accomplish.

Scrapbooking to Learn - good step-by-step example.

Hands of a Child - an entire business geared toward lapbooking...who knew? You can purchase and download lapbooks on almost any subject. They also offer a free project each quarter.