Lapbooking - What the Cool Kids Do

I never could really get into the idea of lapbooking before. If you have never heard of it before, you can check out a video here.  It always seemed a little odd to me and I couldn't really see the point.

But now, I get it.

Last year, Rugrat read Little House on the Prairie. I happened across a lapbooking template for the book that was free so I downloaded it and we made a "map" of their journey on a piece of poster board. I thought it lent itself well to a "map" since I could print out the states and we could connect them with yarn to show the progression of the events.

 I probably should have waited to put Kansas on though since most of the book takes place there and then made an arrow or something for the end point. But, oh well, I was learning.

And so was she it turns out. Rugrat seemed to retain a lot more of the book because she was basically revisiting it in pieces. And it is still one of her favorites.

Although, some of that can be attributed to the fact that good 'ole Laura has still got it!

So this year, I thought we might try it with making an actual lapbook. Combining what she just read with cutting, gluing, and writing things that stuck out to her or interested her seems to be a good blend for retention.

We had primarily used them for literature during the year but I realized as we began our second text in Geography that lapbooks would work wonderfully for that too.

We began making one for each continent with a page (or two) for each country in the book. If I can ever get it to work, I will share a video I made of our Europe one for someone recently who also wanted to try it out.

We were not finished with it yet. They are not the neatest things ever made nor are they perfect at all. They aren't even the way I would have made my own.

But they are hers. And she is remembering things that we studied. She even discusses some of those things outside of 'doing school' during every day activities. That is learning the way it should happen as far as I'm concerned.

What's more, she now has these awesome 'books' that she made sitting on the shelf that she can look back through any time she wants. They can serve as a simple reminder of what she has learned or she can use them to study too.

So lapbooking is a win for us. And I find myself looking for ways to incorporate them now.

You should give them a try too. You can use the templates for notebooking, on posters like we did above, or in other contexts as well. It doesn't have to be in a folded file folder. I think that's why it works. It concentrates on what sticks out to the student and can be adapted to however you want to  do it.