My friend Melissa runs our Parents As Teachers program here in town. We meet every two weeks for toddlers and preschoolers to play and learn. A while ago Melissa gave me three lapbooks on the theme All About Me. The boys loved them and were kept quite busy waiting on a restaurant meal and driving in the car.
I started looking around online for some others and there are all kinds of templates and printables on the Web to create a custom lapbook. But basically they are a file folder folded to open up on a lap in order to do the activities within.
One of Yahoo's favorite books is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie 
and I found a site to print off a lapbook.
and I found a site to print off a lapbook. 
The cookie match teaches kids to count the chocolate chips in the cookie and match it with a number. The double circle in the middle spins with pics underneath so kids can retell the story. The mouse talks about different characteristics of a mouse; pointy claws, small ears, etc. I didn't use all the printables because some of them were too old for Yahoo. So I made up some of my own. The crayon box has crayons of different colors and the three mice on the upper left helps Yahoo learn the concept of different sizes.
She likes the crayons the best!
Yesterday I was filling in for the Sunday School Teacher and thought lapbooks would be a good lesson. As it's spring and all I made Gardening Lapbooks. I cut and pasted everything just because we would be short on time for the kids to do it all. If I were doing this at home with the boys I'd make them do the grunt work!
The cover has a gardening Bible verse and a name tag.
And here's the inside. I found SO many resources for gardening I really could have made 3 or 4 different lapbooks that were completely different.
We had some gardening magazines the kids cut up to fill in some of the spots like what plants they would put in a garden.
If they didn't want to cut and paste pictures they could also draw or write in the empty spots. Ideally they would photograph their garden, house, etc. but like I said we were working on short time.
A place to talk about some of God's wonderful critters; the gardening good and the gardening bad.
And for some of the younger kids and lace up carrot for fine motor skills.
I really love the idea of lapbooks. With a little creativity and some imagination a lapbook could be used for any subject and any age level. I've seen some really neat ones (just Google image lapbooks) older kids have done about different history and science themes.
My boys really like the lapbooks too. I'm not sure if they like them so well because they are portable or it's just the novelty of being able to have so much 'stuff' in such a small space but I'm thinking we might be making a few of these for the summer. We are planning a couple road trips and I think all the tourist brochures that get collected would be a good resource for a lapbook.
Have you ever done a lapbook? Please share if you have! What good themes can you think of for a lapbook?
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I've never made lapbooks but they look like fun. I'll have to check them out further and see if our new volunteer teacher can put some together for the kids.
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