I posted a few days ago about how our school year didn't start as I had planned. It's a good thing that my curriculum plans are flexible. I had some tentative plans that aren't going to work right now, but thankfully I also have a new review product that filled in the gaps quite nicely.
A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks has lapbook materials suitable for all sorts of homeschool needs. Families involved in Classical Conversations can find lapbooks to correspond with that work, and families using Apologia science books will find lapbooks to correspond with those textbooks. My favorite products are the Stand-Alone Topical Lapbooks. While there are lots of good options, Lauren has been doing their The Greatest Inventors study to start this school year.
When I opened the digital file from A Journey Through Learning, I was immediately relieved to see that it wasn't as complicated as some lapbooks we've done. The lapbook base can be any solid color file folders. We used plain manilla folders, but I'm sure it would be prettier in a color. In fact, it might be cool to coordinate the file folders to represent a particular subject (green for science, blue for literature, etc).
The materials can all be printed on plain white paper. I printed half of the pages on regular printer paper because they contained information for Lauren to read, and I printed all the lapbook components on cardstock to better stand up over time. (It might've been nice to have the information first to print on plain paper and the lapbook pieces separate to print after loading cardstock, but it wasn't a big deal to divide the printing.) The lapbook components have some use of color in the illustrations to make the finished lapbook visually appealing, and thankfully it wasn't so much color that I worried about my printer running out of ink. The booklets go together easily, and I won't have to track down brads or other often-misplaced supplies to put it all together. Basically, we just need file folders, paper, glue, and a stapler to do the whole project.
The best part about this lapbook is that all the information is included. The Greatest Inventors lapbook covers 19 different inventors -- Johannes Gutenberg, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, George Washington Carver, Alexander Graham Bell, and others. It is organized so that the student can read a short biography of an inventor. Most of these passages are less than a page long, and they appear to be written at a fifth or sixth grade reading level.
After reading the inventor's biography, Lauren completes the lapbook activities which typically ask her to remember (or look back to find) specific facts about the inventor. She can then cut out the lapbook component and glue it into the lapbook. One great feature about this lapbook is that the directions show her where the completed projects will go in the folders. She can glue them into place right away instead of having to wait until the end of our unit study.
A Journey Through Learning offers lap books to fit all sorts of homeschooling needs. For us, the Stand-Alone Topical lapbooks are proving their worth as a way to extend learning on not-so-perfect homeschool days. Thank goodness they have plenty of other options for me to choose from when she finishes learning about The Greatest Inventors. My biggest challenge might be deciding whether I should get a history-themed product like Overview of the 20th Century or a science-themed one like Inside My Body. There's also Women Inventors, which would follow nicely with the one Lauren is doing now.
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