Our 1st Lapbook!

Last week, Kathryn and I finished creating our very first lapbook! We started on a composers lapbook first, but that one is still in process. This one, however, is all done — and very cool!

The projects and plan for this lapbook is part of our WinterPromise curriculum on early American history, but the New World Explorers CD is available for purchase from Homeschool in the Woods. With this CD, you can print all the masters for the lapbook, or you could do the projects to put in a notebook instead of a lapbook, if that’s more your style.

We took several weeks to work on this. The most creative project Kathryn did was creating a brochure to convince Europeans to want to come to the “New World.” It’s fabulous — and funny. I expected her to balk at doing it, but she took the idea and ran with it. I think she’ll have to be in charge of marketing and advertising for our business! 😉 (You can see the cover “Come Visit Virginia” in the photos below.)

Even the doubloons and pieces of eight we made go in this, in a pocket that looks like a treasure chest, which is what Kathryn is making here:

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A couple of photos of our finished product…

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So why didn’t we ever make a lapbook before? Honestly, it just seemed like too much trouble, especially if I had to come up with everything on my own. But with this, I didn’t. And it was fun! Kathryn enjoyed it, it was very hands-on and helped cement what she has been learning, and I love that we have such an easy-to-keep record of our studies. We’ve already started working on a new lapbook for our Colonial studies, and we’ll be working on it for the next few weeks. Of course, I’ll post about it, too!