Lapbooking-The Happy Horse Book

Lapbooking is our latest discovery and we are having a blast. Basically, a lapbook is a creative format to showcase what a child has learned in a unit study. So, here is what we do. Ami chooses a subject to study. Since we started lapbooking two weeks ago (and we do one book per week), she has done two so far. The first was a frog book (My Fun Frog Book). The second is what you see here. Next week we are going to do Chimps. Ami decided that the title of it is going to be "My Charming Chimp Book."

So, we usually find a coloring page online and make that the cover image. Ami does 90% of her own handwriting in the books. She writes an ISBN # on the back :o)

We focus on as many aspects of whatever subject we are studying. This part of the book has a mini-book of horse face markings and what they are called (blaze, snip, stripe, etc). Ami read all the words and matched them with the faces (which she colored), and glued the book together. Another mini-foldout was "other kinds of horses" which folds out in flaps and you see a unicorn, a zebra, donkey, mule and pegasus. She drew and colored each one and read the names which I wrote. We made a math measuring activity of measuring different kinds of horses (draft, riding horse and pony), using a tiny hand on the end of a popsicle stick. Also, as you can see, we covered horse vocbulary words in a mini-book, and another flap file of what horses eat, which she drew, colored and spelled each thing (carrots, apples, oats, barley, etc...).


Next, you can see there is a flap which folds up and we have colored a horse which we used as a labeling diagram--things like "girth," "withers," "mane" and "rump" are labeled. Ami also colored and wrote names of horse colors (palomino, gray coat, chestnut, etc). Finally, we cut out pics from a horse supply catalog of all the things one would need to ride a horse, and glued and labeled those. She also wrote a poem--all by herself without me asking her to do it. She just presented it to me, and then she typed it out on the computer by herself. She decorated the book with unicorn stickers that her Auny Kathy gave her (she's been saving those up for something special).

We love these lapbooks because they represents a weeks worth of work, and it can always be referenced and added to. She feels proud of the work and ownership of it in the end. She wants to show everyone what she made. Besides the lapbook creation, we also read books about the subject throughout the week, and maybe watch a video on the subject matter. This week we watched Black Beauty. When we do our Chimp study she will watch a Jane Goodall video (and hopefully have her book signed by Jane when she comes for a visit).