Homeschool Preschool: Transportation Lapbook

Ds4 and I completed a transportation lapbook this week.  It was simple yet fun.  I found it at Homeschoolshare.  How impressed I was when ds saw an airplane and said "That's a form of transportation!" :)

Here is the cover.  We just found some clipart on Yahoo.

Opened up we see a car shape book about colors, a layer book of the different types of transportation, some cards that we used to sort and identify, a bus with movable wheels and the "Wheels On the Bus" song inside, and a cute boat ds painted that can rock back and forth.

Underneath the middle section we have an emergency vehicles wheel, a shapes bus, and a "what starts with b" booklet.

Here is the cute alphabet train booklet unfolded.

Here are some of the books we used with this study.  We also have an older book I found at a book sale long ago that is about planes and has flaps to lift and tabs to pull.  Always a hit with the kiddos. :)  This lapbook is an enjoyable way to introduce transportation to preschoolers.

Desert Animals Lapbook

Ds3 studied desert animals in Sept. and we made a lapbook from his endeavors.  All the items for the lapbook come from Homeschoolshare and are free!

Here are the books we read for our studies.

He really liked the one titled Desert above as it showed the animals in the desert from a fun point of view.  It started with an ant and says "Someone sees the ant..." and it describes who sees it and the next page shows it's a scorpion!  Then someone sees the scorpion, etc.  He did not like the Magic School Bus book, which saddens me.  He thinks he is too old for cartoons and childish drawings (he's only 7 and I don't think the Magic School Bus is all that childish.)

Here's the cover and the inside.  Very simple lapbook but he learned a lot and enjoyed making it.  I enjoyed that it was all done for me. ;)  What we did was pick an animal, read about it in the books, look it up on the internet and then complete the booklet for that animal for the lapbook.  Can't beat that for free!

Farm Lapbook

Wow, can't believe September has passed by so quickly.  Ds4 (my 3yo) and I studied about the farm this month.  It was a blast!  We read lots of books, did tons of coloring and even play-acted being farmers in the backyard with pretend and real tools.  And we compiled a lot of our endeavors into a lapbook. :)

Here are the books we used for our farm study.

Also a cute little book called Duffy On The Farm.  Some of the resources I used for this study were The Mailbox Thematic Unit for farms     and the farm and zoo lesson plans from Kinderplans.com. 

Here's the cover of ds's lapbook and what it looks like upon opening.  You open the barn door and see what large animals live on the farm, and you slide the strip across the hayloft and see what smaller animals live there. The barn outline and the pics of the animals are from Kinderplans, but I made up the little sliding thing.  There are little booklets about what baby animals live on the farm and what sounds farm animals make, as well as a math activity where he had to add the correct amount of spots to numbered cows.

  The top pic here is of some worksheets from The Mailbox book, re-telling the Little Red Hen story and another one teaching prepositions that you can't see.  The bottom pic is off some little arts/crafts things we did.  I tried to find a farm in our area that would host a tour for us, but in our neck of the woods it's more about peanuts and cotton fields.  This was a fun unit with plenty of resources available from your library and the internet. :)

June Lapbook: Bugs

I am a member of the Little Laplinks group hosted by Valerie at Lapbook Lessons.  Every month we pick a theme for a lapbook with our little ones.  The theme for June is bugs...and ds and I actually completed it in June!  Yea!  We had a lot of fun with this one, our third lapbook so far.  We, btw, is my ds4 (3yo) and me.  We would have days where we did nothing, and then days where we spent most of the day together working on the lapbook (and revisiting the two others we have made.)  Now that school is out I can really focus on ds4, since most of the stuff we do is really hands-on and meant to be done with lots of parental help.  I'm glad we had the lapbook to work on together and that we got to spend so much time just the two of us.

 

Here is the cover.  We had so many little books and things we made a "double folder" (sorry, I don't know all the "technical" names for things yet, basically it's two file folders glued together.)  I got the big ladybug from TeacherView.com and the little pics from a pre-made bug theme at Kinderplans.com.

The first section.  On the left is a little booklet that compares bugs and a pocket holding some cards depicting the life cycle of a ladybug which ds can put into order.  In the middle is a little book made up of fact cards with a pic of the insect and info on it.  Below that is a little book that details the various ways bugs move.  On the right is a worksheet ds completed, coloring the specified number of bugs.

Here we see the fact book opened up to the dragonfly card.

The second section.  On the left, a cute little rhyme I got from Carissa that my ds just loves to sing and act out.  In the middle is a butterfly shapebook that tells the story of how butterflies grow, and a another booklet that tells how bugs are similar.  On the right is a color matching game.

The color matching game opened up.

The last page of the bugs booklet, where ds drew a pic of his favorite bug.  How cute!

On the back of the lapbook is another matching game that I got out of an older issue of The Mailbox Magazine.

Well, there we go!  Lots of fun and learning as well.  We even did a craft, a caterpillar made out of an egg carton.

 

I don't know who's more precious, the kiddo or the one-eyed caterpillar lol!

Here is ds playing one of the matching games.  Pardon the casual attire, it is summer after all lol.

Besides the ideas from the wonderful ladies at Little Laplinks, I used purchased templates from Kinderplans.com and the Flowers and Insects book from Hands of a Child.

A Fish Out Of Water Lapbook

Ds4 and I read the book A Fish Out Of Water, and I saw a free lapbook for it on Homeschool Share, so we jumped right in! (Even though we are supposed to be working on our backyard bugs lapbook for Little Laplinks...don't tell lol.) He really enjoyed the book and I can tell he learned a lot from it, about feeding fish, police and firemen, the parts of a fish, etc. The lapbook was very simple with not much to it. (Well, our version, anyway.) We didn't do the parts about nutrition and the food groups...I wanted this to be simple, short and sweet. It only took us a couple of days, working on it for just a few minutes a day and that is just how I wanted it. Here's a peek.

The last thing there is his "fish artwork." We cut out a little fish shape from a sponge and he used it to paint on some fish. When he was done he sprinkled it with glitter. He says the larger fish are ones that he fed too much, like Otto in the book lol. I think it's adorable.

Definitely check out this book and companion lapbook for a cute and easy (and educational) way to pass the summer days with your little ones.

Rainbow Lapbook

Valerie at Lapbook Lessons hosts the Little Laplinks group. Every month they pick a theme, share links to resources for the lapbook, and then post the results. This is not only my first time joining in, but my first attempt at a lapbook! I am actually a little late posting this, as it's April's theme, but better late than never lol. The theme for the lapbook was rainbows...I used resources that group members linked to, as I am such a newbie at all this and am still learning and trying to understand the "concept" of the whole lapbook thing.



I have to say, though, that this was so much fun! My 3yo and I worked on the project together. I let him do as much as possible (or as much as he wanted), even practicing his cutting skills. He played with all the little individual books and projects over and over before we even got them in the folder.

Here he is with the completed lapbook.

He enjoyed me singing the color songs book on the left, and doing the color mixing activity shown in the middle.

That God Made Rainbows minibook is his fave. To the right of that, I just folded a piece of construction paper in quarters and on the front wrote "Things that are red, blue, etc. As you open it up...

You see that he found pics of things that were the color and cut them out and pasted them on the correct section.

Our first little lapbook was fun and we will definitely do more. They are a lot of work, but well worth it to spend such quality time with ds. And the ladies of the Little Lapbooks group are so creative they make it easy for me to do so. Many thanks to them all.