What the heck is a lapbook?

A short year ago I was wondering the same thing.  So, being the Barefoot Adventurer I am... I found out.  At first I thought it seemed a little cheesy.  Just a folded file folder?  With a bunch of stuff glued inside it?  But then I began to grasp the larger picture.  A Lapbook is a great way to gather a bunch of info about one topic and put it a format that is easy for a child to explore and understand.  And it's pretty much free.  Which I love.  And since your kid put it together they will want to, theoretically, look at it from time to time to remember what they did.

Dads doing Math

So I decided to do our first lapbook when we went to the Oregon coast this past summer.  We were traveling with my sister and her family who also homeschool, so I knew they'd have some homeschool work planned, anyway.  I started googling lapbooks about the Ocean and found TONS of stuff.  Mostly I used templates from this site which focuses on a great book with which I was already familiar, Hello Ocean.  I explores the ocean through the lens of the five senses.  Great book. 

Each morning we spent a couple hours doing school work.  Most of our time (with my Kinder-kid) was spent reading books together about the ocean.  Lots of non-fiction and fiction alike.  I couldn't possibly remember all of them.   We did some math and reading exercises then we worked on the lapbook.  

The open lapbook

The Tide-pool mini-book (connected with a brad)

Counting by fives and tens

The five senses mini-book

 If I had it to do over, I would have printed some of our pics of the beach and included nature journals we did as well as writing down the names of all the books we read on the back of the folder.  Overall, it was a great experience!  Try it out.  Do you lapbook?  Share your experiences?