During my first year teaching 3rd grade at a charter school, I discovered something about myself—I’m not cut out to teach elementary school. I love teaching high school and middle school classes at our co-op, but I struggled to teach the younger kids. Finally, after reading the Mitford books, I discovered that I am like Father Tim. I don’t know how to have fun.
When we began homeschooling, I leaned toward Classical education and others that are more literature based rather than activity based. I didn’t feel that unit studies fit my personality. I’ve been blessed with kids who love to read, so it hasn’t been hard to do most of our learning via reading and narration. Add to that the space issue, we just haven’t done that many fun projects for school. However, lapbooks seem doable to me, so I was happy to see five different lapbooks arrive in my inbox from A Journey Through Learning. A Journey Through Learning produces ready-made lapbooks on a plethora of topics—just print, complete the minibook, and assemble the finished product.
Due to several unexpected delays, we did not begin this project as soon as I wanted to, so I don’t have any completed pictures to post yet. While we received more than one lapbook, including one on deserts that we will probably create later this year, I decided to work through the Autumn unit study, hoping that my little ones could grasp these topics more easily than the ones on Amphibians or Reptiles. (Although, after K caught a bitty frog this afternoon and is hoping to keep it for a pet, perhaps one of those would have been fine after all!) We also love the season, so it has been fun (there’s that word again) to do these activities.
The topics include: Autumn Equinox, Migration, Autumn Holidays, Symbols of Autumn, and Autumn Foods, among others. I am not completing the projects in order, which is one of the benefits of a non-sequential study like this. You can customize the sequence.
Because we are trying out workboxes, I have included the minibook activities as daily independent work. I’ve tried to plan it so that the two older kids will be working on them at about the same time and so far it has worked out that way. These two tend to butt heads more often than work cooperatively, at least in most school activities. However, they seem to really enjoy working on these together. With the three and five year old, we’ve been reading other autumn story books and doing the minibooks together. They all seem to be having fun (that word yet again…perhaps I’m learning!) doing a subject that isn’t as intense as Eastern Hemisphere geography or the state of being verbs!
Although we are enjoying this lapbook, there are a couple drawbacks to these particular studies:
1. I am currently printing with a laser printer, and the colored pictures aren’t nearly as vibrant in black and white! I’d rather have blackline/outline drawings that my kids can color and decorate, rather than the fully illustrated and colored pictures on these. The unit studies we’ve done in the past are the Time Traveler CDs from Amy Pak, at Home School in the Woods. For the most part, those are black and white printer friendly. I also prefer her style of illustration to the clip art/cartoonish style that is predominates these.
2. The minibooks could be combined on the page to reduce the amount of paper used. Each minibook has its own page (or two for some multiple part books) and many of them have a lot of white space around them. Each page also has a mini map showing where the booklet should go, but they have included a full map of each folder at the front, so these additional maps could be removed to allow for doubling up on the patterns. I’m such a paper miser!
Most of the lapbooks are intended for grades 3-7, and at $13.00 per download, these are reasonable for an extra fun, yet academic, activity for that age.
