US Government Lapbook- Elementary Edition

Minus a few little details, they are done.

A run down of the mini books included in their lapbooks:

1. Money: a run down of money fact
2. Term Limits: Limits and term lengths of the President, Congress and Justices
3. Taxes: Facts on Tax
4. Branches of the Military
5. The Election Process

6. The Judicial Branch
7. The 3 Branches of the Governement
8. What is a Democracy
9. The Founding Fathers

10. How a Bill becomes a Law
11. Responsibilities of the People
12. The Bill of Rights
13. Vocabulary pocket

14. President Barack Obama facts
15. Government Services pocket
16. Local TN Government Officals
17. Presidents of the US (Coloring Pages in mini)

18. My Favorite President...they chose completely random ones like Grover Cleveland and Chester Arthur

19. The Constitution- they wrote the preamble



And that is it....

I plan on writing up all my links, books and resources in the next few days to share. Almost all of the mini books were created by me- with the exception of the President Obama and mini president coloring pages.

US Government Lapbook- Preschool Edition

The big boys have been studying the US Government for the past few weeks, and since they are making a lapbook to go along with our studies, I made Cohen his own version to go along with it.

Here's the inside with the flap closed:

On the center flap he has a constitution coloring book, a pocket holding president's names he wrote, and a person-shaped book about citizen responsibilities.

Underneath is this:

The 3 branches of government, a wheel of the Founding Fathers and a 'My favorite president..." book.

TN Government

Divisions of the Military

Money, Who Was the First President, and Our President Is...

Inside the Money book....

On the back is his Constitution

And a book on the Bill of Rights

His was a lot of cutting and gluing, handwriting practice, and listening to our discussions. A few of his books- like the Branches of Government and the Bill of Rights book were cut up from the resources I was using while reading.

The big boys should finish up their lapbooks on Monday, so I will share those then.

On clocks and time....

Right now in the co-op class I am teaching we are finishing up telling time. Here's a couple things we've done in the past couple weeks to help the kids learn how to tell time....

We made the standard paper plate clock....They cut and glued all the pieces then we worked on setting the clocks for certain times. We manipulated a paper clock to see how the half and quarter hours cut the clock. The paper clock we used has helped them all tremendously. I printed it from Aussie Pumpkin Patch and they have all used it to help them get quicker at reading the time with out having to count by 5's all they way around each time.


We had a life sized game board set up around the room. I printed a bunch of blank clocks and drew the times I wanted. We were focusing on tell the time to 5-minutes and seeing that the hour hand doesn't point directly at the hour, that it moves closer and closer to the next hour as each minute passes. They kids really enjoyed throwing the oversized dice and walking the board. They did really well at the time-telling too.


These are the prizes for 'winning' or completing the game. White and milk chocolate clock faces.


We also played clock-face go fish. It can also be played as rummy or as memory/concentration. Since we were running out of time we did move from Go Fish! to just spreading and matching the digital time to the clock face. The times on these cards were to the minute.


We are making a lapbook in our class, so all of these pieces...the paper plate clock, the Go Fish cards, and a mini version of the clock-face game board will be included for them to play with at home too.

Peanut Lapbook

Today we finished up the peanut lapbook I posted about yesterday. It was a quick unit, but they enjoyed it and I think they will retain the information well. Here is Rylan's completed lapbook:

And here is Cale's:

The books included:

Parts of a peanut plant (with the picture taken from here)
Time line of the Peanut- from seed to harvest
Mini book on George Washington Carver
From Nut to Butter: How to Make Peanut Butter
Uses of the Peanut accordian book
Where in the World? Peanut Producing Countries
Where in the US do peanuts grow?
The Peanut Butter Experiment (also explained in my previous post)
Other types of Legumes
On the back they glued thier copywork printed from here

and Rylan's also included peanut math. Where I wrote out 5 word problems like these: If 1 acre of peanuts makes 30,000 sandwiches, how many does 7 acres make? and If you have 200 peanuts do you have enough for each of your 5 friends to have 32 peanuts each?

The Amazing Peanut

So I was going to do a unit on Ancient Greece...but then we had the books from the library, read the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, read a comic-like book about 2 kids going back in time to the first Olympics, and a few others....and well that was about all the interest there was....so we moved on....

Yep...the peanut. I got the book The Life and Times of the Peanut at the library so we could learn a little bit about them before we dove into growing them this spring. So we picked up a couple bags of peanuts at the store yesterday....and I drew up the lapbook pieces last night...

This morning they got to work.... Cale cut out all his pieces, they did some copy work- Rylan has been very interested in Presidents lately, so for his copywork he learned that both Thomas Jefferson and Jimmy Carter were peanut farmers. We talked about other legumes....clover was surprising to them...we labeled the parts of the plant. Then we got to the fun stuff...

We shelled. I got 2 kinds at the store...roasted and raw. We shelled the roasted, keeping the shells, skins and nut in separate containers....Did you know you can make paper from the skins? And wallboard from the pods?

Once we had a good amount of peanuts we took them to the food processor. We didn't have any peanut oil, but we added a little water and honey. We spent quite awhile without all that great of a result...the first try resulted in peanut crumbs, so we took the crumbs and roasted them in a pan for awhile to try and extract the oil a bit. We tried my hand blender and normal blender. They were making guesses as to what the problem was...not a strong enough food processor? Too dry from previous roasting in their shells? Need additional peanut oil? Eventually we gave up and tried it anyway....you could squeeze it into a ball, but it wasn't spreadable, plenty of oil was left on our hands. My guess is the processor didn't do it's job. But we added more honey and some dry milk and made peanut butter balls.

The above book is for our data. Our plan is do try and make peanut butter from commercially roasted nuts (above), raw nuts, and raw nuts roasted at home- both of those we will do this afternoon. To see which tastes the best and which makes the best peanut butter.

Then Rylan read this little book on George Washington Carver that I wrote up. And we read some more about him in the The Life and Times of the Peanut. We'll finish up tomorrow with a timeline of growth, where in the US/World peanuts are grown and uses for peanuts other than peanut products to eat.

Now I need to go vacuum up peanut shells off the floor....

My World: Earth Lapbooks

They are done!! Rylan was a trooper through the continent books and did 90% of the writing, dictating the rest. Originally I was going to make 2 of the same, but as I was creating I realized Cale would not be able to keep up- with the writing and the attention span, so I scaled his down and made a K version.


Mini books in Rylan's version:

• What is a Galaxy
• Solar System: listing the planets in order
• Geography terms pocket. We made a salt dough map and labeled each of the terms. Then we looked them up in the glossary of one of our books and wrote the definitions for the pocket.
• Iside the Earth. We did a little activity with construction paper circles for the different layers of the earth and labeled them
• 7 continent books: Each book contained a map, a world map for him to locate and color the continent, a page to list and color a flag for a few countries, a page on languages, georgraphy and interesting facts.
• World's oceans petal book.
• A label-the-oceans book
• Ocean Facts book
• 4 mini-matchbooks for random US facts
• a TN book: included state flower, bird, nickname, flag, date joined the union, abbreviation...
• Major Marks of the US: Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate, Old Faithful, Washington DC, Mt. Rushmore, and the Grand Canyon
• Map of the US: he drew/colored the Mississippi River, Appalachians, Rockies, TN, Washington DC, Great Lakes then numbered and labeled them on the inside.
• Flag Facts on the US: We made paper flags and discussed the flags nicknames and the meanings of the stars and stripes
• 4 books on some important buildings around the world: The Great Pyramid, The Coliseum, The Eiffel Tower and The Great Wall of China
• 6 books on 'extremes' : The longest river, the tallest building, the oldest moutains, the tallest moutain, the lowest point on earth, the largest volcano
• On the back I made a game board and 3 sets of colored cards: one on geography terms, one on random world fact (biggest continent, which ocean is the largest, which continent includes France, etc...) and US facts. We will be playing it the next few days to help retain all the info they have learned.

Mini books in Cale's version

• Solar System, inside earth, 4 US mini matchbooks, TN facts, label-the-ocean book, US major marks, and labeling the US map and 4 of the 6 'extremes' books were the same as Rylan's
• Wonders of the World. These were the same 4 buildings as Rylan's but his was in a circle book and had no fact writing involved.
• Flag Facts: same as Rylan's except that he had 2 specific questions to answer instead of blank lines to write on.
• World map. The major change was he did a map similar to the US one for the continents. He colored each one and labeled them on the inside. He drew flags as well after his writing- but that was his choice :) I think he could copy flags all day.

Here are the pictures from inside the books:

Hard at Work

We've been hard at work this week. Rylan and Cale have been working through the "My World" lapbook I created, which spans from the Milky Way to TN and everywhere in between, with a focus mostly on geography.

So far this is the most writing intensive lapbook we've done, and they are doing really well with it. I think Rylan is close to the point where writing will stop being work and become something natural- if I could only get him spelling on his own.

Cale is improving. He's been sick with headaches all week, but in the mornings when he is at his best he's done a lot of hard work .

Around the House...

I was going to do a wrap up of 2008- type post, but to tell the truth, New Year's is not real big in our house. We don't do much to celebrate. Nothing changes....it's not the end of our year in any way....

But around our house....these little guys are growing up and almost ready to leave their mama. Both- Thumper and Cottontail- have turned out to be lop eared. And whoever ends up being thier owners will recieve some very tame bunnies. This little one (of mine) in particular loves them. He sits with them and when they run away he'll grab them yelling. "Back! me!" Cottontail is good with him. And just his size.
They are going to have a hard time giving them up.

In school new....we've taken off of scheduled work for about 2 weeks and we start back on Monday. I've finally gotten myself back in planning mode....and have a couple lapbooks planned. One on Ancient Greece...which I haven't started and one on "Our World"...which I am just about done with.

I really like planning out our lapbooks, but it does take quite a bit of work since I make almost all the minibooks/templates myself- as well as the activities to go with them. At least I always have someone willing to help with the scissor work. Next week all these books will get filled with words and knowledge

Animal Research Project (Lapbooks)

Last week we were discussing animal classification, and on Friday I had both Rylan and Cale choose an animal they wanted to do a project on. Rylan chose a Brittle Star and Cale chose a Hermit Crab. Sunday we cleared out the library on all the books on invertebrates, ocean life, crustaceans and echinoderms. They both wanted to do a lapbook, but we did it a little different than we have in the past, since this was supposed to be their projects. I read most of the books to them of course, and helped find internet pictures and resources, but as far as the lapbooks, I wanted the majority of the work to be theirs.

The first thing I did was make up a set of Animal Reasearch Questions, based on the information I wanted them to find and the questions we all came up with together during our brainstorming session. The questions are relatively simple, since my boys are young: animal type, habitat, parts, food, etc...You can find them here under What kind of animal is it? along with the files for the Animal Classification Box.

We read through the questions, then started to read in our books. My oldest used the index and table of contents himself. They dictated notes to me when we came across answers to some of the questions. Then I gave them a basket of premade mini-books. I basically just used all my scraps from previous lapbooks and folded them in half or triangles or whatnot. No templates or printing. So when they were ready to start they would pick a question, pick a book and answer. They each helped find a page full of pictures off the internet to glue in their books. My 5 yr old needed more prompts and spelling help. He dictated more. My 7 yr old did almost all the work himself. I think I wrote 1 question for him.

Cale finished his yesterday and is vry proud- it is completely him- right down to the backwards and upside down cover (which is on the back). Rylan finished his up this morning. And he "presented" it to me when he finished. He used the book to help him but most of the facts he recalled; he was really interested in the basket star. Cale "presented" his to Paul this morning too. He needed a little more prompting for answers, but recalled most of the info too.

Go! Diego Go!

My 3 year old is obsessed with Diego. We've got books and 1 movie (b-day present) and he always picks Diego to watch when it's his turn to pick at their 30 min movie time. For a few weeks now he has been Diego. This is the first time any of my kids have pretended to be someone or something else for an extended period of time. So awhile back I was blog browsing and saw the Tot Books at Carisa's blog. I made up the Cars one for him, which he loved. So since the older boys are getting ready to do an animal lapbooks I thought I would work on one for him. Originally it was going to be small, but I wanted to add a bit more so the final product is a full file folder, but depending on the age of the child you could skip somethings if you wanted to make a Tot Book size.

It's fairly simple: pockets for upper and lowercase letters, shape tracing, beginning sounds, number 1-10 (with spanish words too), a simple maze and line drawing, a positional word book. He hasn't worked on it finished yet, but he discovered half the booklets last week and has been reading and counting with them all week. All files can be downloaded here .

***all images are copyrighted and can be found at Disney Clips. Files can be used for personal use only. To view more Tot Books visit Carisa's site.

All About Me Lapbooks

I picked something sort of easy for our first project. Something they would find fun, but incorporated some of the information they need to know: full name, address, phone numbers etc. Most of this was review for my 2nd grader but not quite memorized for my Kindergartener. I also wanted to introduce the concept of history in thier own lives before we jump into the history of everything else.

The minibooks/parts included:

• A self portrait


• My Time Line, downloaded from somewhere but I can't remember where

• a family tree- I c/p a clipart tree and drew the boxes I needed in Word


• Likes and Dislikes


• My Family


• Measurements accordian book


• graph of the above measurements

• a person shape book taken from an Evan Moor Theme Pocket book, downloaded from Googlebooks. Name, age, height, right/left handed, boy/girl, etc

Most of the books were made by me. It was pretty simple. But they enjoyed working on it.

Words! Lapbook

We finally finished this one!! It took a lot more work than I expected, and I am glad I went into the whole thing with a rough sketch of what I wanted to accomplish and where it would all go. I am also very glad I have kids who love to cut and glue! My goal was to have a sort of word book for the kids to use with their reading. As we were putting it together, my oldest was reading words to his 4 yr old brother while the 4 yr old read the words he could back, so I think it will accomplish my goal. I also plan to use it later if any particular group of words is causing trouble. Anyway, so here it is....

Here is what is inside (using 3 file folders)

• 
  The first small flap contains 5 pockets. 1 for each vowel. Each pocket has word cards for short CVC words.


• 
  the 2nd small flap has 6 minibooks made from word cards for the -ng and -nk words


• 
  The first large section is for the long A sounds: ea, ay, ei, ey, eigh, a_e and ai


• 
  The 3rd small flap has flaps for ar and or, along with a mini-poster for oy and oi


• 
  The 4th small flap has 3 pockets for the 3 pronunciations for -ed and words for "ea" with the short e sound


• 
  The 2nd large section has the long e sounds: e_e, e, ee, ei, ea, ie and ey/y. It also has the 3 "ch" sound and all of the "er" sounds


• 
  The 5th small flap has some of the silents: ph, wr, b, kn,gn and t


• 
  The 6th small flap has -ck and the voiced and unvoiced "th"


• 
  The 3rd large section has Long o sounds: oa, o, ow,oe, and o_e. And the "sh" sounds of sh, ti, si, ci


• 
  The 7th small flap has word card books fro au/aw and ow/ou


• 
  The 8th small flap has the 6 different pronunciations of -ough


• 
  The 4th large section has the long u sounds (and variations of it): u, ue, u_e, ui, ew, oo (and it's second pronunciation) aswell as contractions.


• 
  And the 5th large section, on the back, has the long I sounds: i, i_e, ie, y and igh. And -tch, -dge, wh and qu

Here are a few links to the online resources....the rest was all just me and Word.

oi/oy, au/aw ou/ow, long I, r-controlled and other vowel combinations were found here, and I used this site to print some of the word cards. The blank templates were from Homeschool Helper then cut and pasted into Word so I could edit them.

And here are some of the views of inside:

Weather Lapbook

We started our weather unit this past week....most of it was based upon the requirements for the Cub Scouts Weather belt loop and pin. My 6 yr old worked on this lapbook to pull all his stuff together in one place:

The first side flap has a circle folded into fourths with his picture of the water cycle. Also it has our vocab words- I cut out cloud shapes and he glued them on craft sticks and I wrote the words, he looked them up in the glossary or dictionary and read the definition (dictated for me to write)

The middle is covered by his cloud page. Nothing beats cotton to make clouds! We made 6 different flaps, he wrote the name and created the cloud and then we read about what types of weather are associated with each to write on the inside. Under the clouds: There is a cloud shaped book about lightning and what causes it, a 'ways we use water 'mini book, a cloud shaped, pop-up rainbow he drew and how they are made. And a how accurate are forecasters minibook.

The other side flap has a copywork page- I wrote out some weather saying and he copied them below. And our weather journal for a 6 day period. We recorded rain, temp and wind.

The back consists of the Billy, Maria and the Thunderstorm coloring book. They have a few different titles on various weather situation- you can find them here. The extreme weather book was a cut-and-paste from the Owlie Skywarn's Weather Book. and a venn diagram comparing tornadoes to hurricanes.

A lot of the full paage sized documents I scaled down in the printer options to print 2-4 pages/sheet instead of 1 page/sheet so they would fit better in our book. I have another to share....my 4yr old requested another "reading lapbook" as he put it.....so we did one today on the short I sound. He didn't finish one part- the writing word cards and didn't want me to take pictures of it until he did that. So maybe I will share that one tomorrow.

-AT Word Family Lapbook

I was feeling like I haven't been working with my 4 yr old enough. He is on the brink of learning how to read. He can sound out words pretty well. And loves to "read" to himself. He has a ton of books memorized and I think he will be they type of kid who wants to read real books. He can read a couple of the easy readers (ie. BOB books and the ones that came with his SSR&W) but it goes like this..."Mat sat ." but he reads: "Mat sat on a blanket at the beach." He will read the words if I slow him down, but he doesn't care much for the simplified text. So last night I threw this lapbook together, and I while my oldest played the ABSeas fishing game with the 2 yr old. We sat down and worked on it. Didn't take very long, he already could do most of this...but I was suprised how well he sounded out the harder words like acrobat.

I got the materials for it from: Hubbard's Cupboard, Carl's Corner and here are the word family ice cream cones which he really liked. A few things were from my personal collection or I made them myself.

Human Body Lapbook

Here is my son's lapbook that we made along with the Human Body Unit we did last week. He loves to see these as finished products and says this is the best one so far (it is our 3rd). We did all these random books last week and then his favorite part today and yesterday- assembly and decoration.
I also let me 4 yr old make one....but his are simple books with no writing, more coloring, cutting and glue. But he likes to feel involved even though he doesn't quite have the attention span or writing skills for the more involved ones.

Dinosaur Lapbook

While I am on the subject of school work....My 6 yr old son, in first grade. Usually a reluctant reader and writer- well reluctant student in all....worked very hard on his first solo (well...almost solo) lapbook when we studied dinosaurs a few weeks back. I love to look at it. See his writing and thoughts.

Most of the resources for this book came from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/dinosaurs.htm with a few add ons from my collection of links and resources. He loves to show it off so I thought I would do just that....