As I was doing some homeschool research I kept coming across the terms lapbooking, notebooking, minute books, etc. They are just one of the tools you can use to have your children create a “project” around an idea or subject. In Nate’s words “Its basically a scrapbook.” The idea is that it is small enough to fit into the child’s lap, but multilayered enough to fit all the relevant data in one file folder sized project.
Since I like scrapbooking and since Hannah is pretty artsy, I decided that we should do a trial one. She isn’t really doing any specific studies, so our theme is just “what I do in school”. This allows her to have something to show people when they ask her what she is learning. Instead of letting her build it herself (and because I was curious about the mechanics of it all), I created a “skeleton” for her. I left places for her to write things or glue in pictures as we go. I’m letting it be a living project because the inside page is made up of the books she has been reading. Each day she gets to cut out a picture of the book we read that day and add it to the lapbook. I hope that this will give her a sense of accomplishment and also show her how much she has done.
In all, it was fairly simple to put together. I like the idea that it can be as big or as little as you want/need by adding extensions. And it can be as professional or home grown as you want as well, typing all the text vs writing or drawing vs clipart and photos. Hannah likes it so far. She had a great time cutting out the book pictures to catch up to our current progress and we’ll have fun taking photos to stick in there. I’m not sure if we will do very many of these, I guess only time will tell.
All The Photos
I’ll update when this unit is complete and final pictures are available.