lapbooks... the Radtke way

Jessica... I thought I would just make a post with pictures in order to answer your question about lapbooks. But I'm going to start by saying that we don't do them as they are outlined in the instruction book. You are supposed to use file folders to make some sort of large fold out book. I didn't have any file folders on hand and didn't feel like buying any just for these types of projects so I opted to use some stuff I had on hand. A couple of years ago I bought a ream of slick yellow cover stock at Staples by accident. So, we used that as the pages of our book. When we're done, I'll three hole punch the whole thing and put metal rings through the holes. They could also be added to a three ring binder if you're doing more of a Well Trained Mind approach to organizing your child's work.

So, here is our cover to our "lapbook" on Snow from Hands of a Child. At this point, we work together on our lapbooks since there's quite a bit of writing that Clara just isn't ready for. I haven't tried any of the books for younger children so perhaps if we were doing one of those, she would be able to do her own. For each section in the reading, there is a cut-out project to fill out and assemble. For this one there was also a vocabulary project that we filled out as we came across the words in the readings (definitions are included with the pack... but if you are working on dictionary skills you wouldn't have to use the ones provided).
Clara listened in on everything and participated in the experiments that were included.... but as for the lapbook elements, I gave her the job of coloring and decorating them once Alex had filled them out.
The projects are a variety of little folded, turning or pop-up type elements. As you can see, I messed up the pink one... so we improvised. With the way I folded it, the text on the last star would have been glued to the paper. One element I couldn't figure out at all. It was supposed to be a pop-up, and I just couldn't reason it out and the instructions were a bit vague in my opinion. Again, we improvised and it still looked good when we glued it down.

There was virtually no prep work for this project. I was able to stay at least one element ahead of them by doing my cutting while Alex was filling out the previous project. Oh... the only prep was printing the whole thing out. I had the downloadable e-book so I printed the text on regular white paper and the projects out on various different colored sheets of paper (I had a ream of "brights" copy paper).

Ummmm... I think that's it! If I missed anything or if you have other questions, please let me know!!