Groundhog's Day Fun

 We have been getting ready for February 2nd this week...Groundhog's Day.

Kimmy made this simple cut and paste project for our calendar wall.

I love the DLTK craft site for all sorts of fun and easy projects.

 I printed off this shadow matching game...It came from the Hands of a Child goundhog project pack.

 The kids are just loving making lapbooks right now.  In fact, Luke doesn't like to see them completed...he wants to just keep adding things to them.

Most of the elements for this lapbook came for free  from Homeschool Share.

 We enjoyed these books as we completed our lapbook.

Our favorite was: Groundhogs. It was a very readable book full of groundhog facts.

It was very helpful in answering the questions in our lapbook.

 The first section of our lapbook.

The next flap of our lapbook.

We will eagerly be watching the news tomorrow to see if we can look forward to an early spring or have to endure six more weeks of winter.

Our Australian Lapbook

 We have had a very enjoyable time creating a lapbook, filled with all the facts we have learned about Australia.

 Many of the components of our lapbook came from Homeschool Share....my very favorite resource for FREE lapbooks and activities.

 We tried our hand at Aboriginal dot painting.

 The artwork turned out lovely.

 We enjoyed many great books...the "meat" of our study.

 We learned all about marsupials, and found another free lapbook at Homeschool Share.

 Our favorite book from the above photo was Wombat Stew.  Many activities for this book can be found here.

 Some fun fiction Australian books are shown above.

 Our "meaty" Australian book was Australia by Ann Heinrichs.

 We spent a whole week learning about the Great Barrier Reef.

 Another resource (which is not free) is from Hands of a Child.

This lapbook is very indepth.  I just picked out what we were interested in.

 I did have to add another file folder to our lapbook because we keep running out of room.

 

 The Australian animal wheel came from Enchanted Learning.

You have to be a member, but I find that Enchanted Learning is a great addition to all our schoolwork.

 

We have all learned alot and enjoyed putting together this lapbook.

We are now looking forward to our next study.

We're headed to Australia

right from the kitchen table.

2012 Summer Olympic Lapbook--Part 1

 I wanted to give you a little information on our 2012 Summer Olympic lapbook.

The main components of the lapbook are from A Journey Through Learning.  This unit consists of a lot a information about the ancient Olympics,the  modern Olympics, and has a printout for individual events, so you can keep track of the winners in your lapbook.

 Another resource was the Modern Olympic Activity printable.

 This is a short printable booklet with some reading and fill in the blank questions.  It also had the Olympic rings, and the areas of the world represented by the rings.  We cut these out and added it to the middle flap of our lapbook.

Some great Olympic coloring pages can be found at Activity Village. 

 We started our Olympic study by reading aloud Hour of the Olympics...a Magic Tree House book.

I found a wonderful sight with online chapter questions.  It also has a vocabulary section for each chapter.  I printed out the vocabulary and did it orally with my 6, 7, and 10 year olds.  They loved answering the chapter questions on the computer.

You can find this unit at this location.

 An inside pocket of our lapbook..We work on our lapbooks in the morning and include the 2 first graders and 5 grader together.

 I am incorporating a study of the city of London into our lapbook.

I found this Mini Travel Lapbook--Cities Around the World: London.

This mini lapbook is being placed into our bigger lapbook.  It contains a perfect amount of information about London to keep it interesting for the different ages for which  I am gearing our lapbook.

Make sure to also check out the free Olympic lapbook available at Homeschool Share. We are also adding a few of these elements to our super big lapbook.

I will be back with more lapbook fun as we progress.

The Courage of Sarah Noble Lapbook

It's been a while since I made a lapbook with any of the kids...so I headed over to Homeschool Share and browsed for hours (because there is so much to see on the site..and all for free).

I chose to have Grace make a The Courage of Sarah Noble lapbook. I knew this book would be easy for her to read. She reads on a fourth grade level, but I wanted her to be able to read the book on her own and also be able to complete the lapbook with little help from me.

All the needed printables are free over at Homeschool Share.

We learned about Newberry Honor books, the original 13 colonies, colonial cooking, new vocabulary words, Native Americans and much more.
It is a very complete unit study neatly rolled up into a lapbook.
And best of all, Grace has declared The Courage of Sarah Noble her favorite book of all time.
She also told me that she looked forward to growing up and making this lapbook with her own daughter.

To finish our unit, Grace made us all johnny cake for lunch...the same meal Sarah made for her father.

They came out wonderfully yummy, made entirely by Grace.

Kimmy gives them the thumbs up!!

The GIANT Olympic Lapbook is complete!

We finished the BIGGEST lapbook we have ever made.

Yeah for the Olympics!

You can find our previous Olympic posts here:

Lapbook part 1,
Olympic torches,

Olympic rings chocolate chip cookies,
Lapbook part 2

One of our final elements was mapping the journey of the Olympic torch.

This map and information came from my original Olympic Lapbook unit.
Mark was very proud to make this poster on the computer.
The Olympic motto is now on the back of our lapbook.

We also added the winners to the "events" page of our book.

The kids took turns drawing the flags of the winning countries of the most gold medals in each event.

Gracie looking up the medal winners on the NBC Olympic coverage website.

Luke got to put the last sticker on the calendar on the day of the closing ceremonies.

This turned into a four file folder lapbook. I added many things from Homeschool Share.
This is the first section. I always enjoy adding pictures of the kids to the lapbook.

The picture of Gracie, Kim and Luke in their olive branch wreaths are one of my favorites.

The second folder

Folder number 3

File folder # 4

We put Mark's poster on the back of folder #3.

Since there are so many folds in our book, I stapled our world maps on one of the empty folds.

I stapled the world maps at the top so that we can look back at the many countries around the world that participated in this years winter Olympics.

We were blessed to receive a package from a wonderful friend in Canada of Olympic memorabilia, of course, I immediately took a picture and added it to our lapbook to be remembered forever.

We can't wait for the summer Olympics--although the kids were pretty bummed when they found out they aren't for 2 more years.