Lapbooks - Yay or Nay?

[WIS0320]

I've looked at a lot of lapbook materials - free and for pay. We've not done any yet though I have use a Lit Pocket which I suppose is similar.

 

I did buy the Galloping the Globe lapbook to go with our geography studies and when I looked at the PDF I just couldn't see how it is going to really help my child learn much of anything. It seems like a lot of cutting/pasting/folding and minimal content?

 

I'm not trying to be negative about lapbooks - I'm asking this question out of complete ignorance. Are lapbooks worth the time and $?

[Aurelia]

I think it depends on the child and the quality of the lapbook. Some look like fluff to me, and others appear to be more substantial and going over them later would be a good review of the material studied. I've never actually used one, however, so take that with a grain of salt. I'm strongly considering trying one, because I have heard about them for years and some folks rave about them.

[LittleIzumi]

Nay here. But I'm not crafty like that :lol:.

[Guest SERENITY]

I don't care for them..but my ds's enjoy lap books at times. My older son said he prefers them because everything is easier to read and separated while giving a presentation. This helps him if he looses his place while reading or becomes nervous in front of a large crowd..science..history ect.

 

My younger ds enjoys them because he is 5 and he likes to cut, cut, cut..lol he offers to do the cutting while his big brother does the writing and research. So it might work for combining younger and older siblings into one lesson. You can go ahead and call it busy work at that point ..sometimes one might need that.

[Kirch]

The lapbooks we've done have been mostly my/our own creations, which allows me to tailor them to exactly what we're learning. I don't really want mini-books that have the content already there for you--that defeats the purpose, imo. Our lapbooks have been more like worksheets or narrations in mini-book format: we read a book (or part of a book) and then make a mini-book about what we read. They're fun to do, my kids have learned a lot, and they still look at them and read through them. HOWEVER, they are pretty labor intensive (a little less so as the kids get older), and we haven't done one in a while because it's tough to do in addition to our normal schoolwork. We've made some really cool lapbooks, but they usually take a long time because I try to include too much and/or have a hard time getting everything ready in a reasonable time. But that's just me! I think we're going to do a human body lapbook for our next science unit. We'll see . . .

 

It can definitely be worth it; it just depends on how much you're willing to put into it and if you're the follow-through type who will stay on top of getting it done. That's one of my issues . . . ;) Here's a link to some of our lapbooks. The snake lapbook was almost entirely from Homeschoolshare (the lapbooks there are usually pretty good as far as you providing all or most of the content); the rest are mostly my creations or compilations (either I made the mini-books from scratch or searched for mini-books or printables and adapted them for our lapbooks).

 

ETA: I don't know that it would be worth the $ to me to buy lapbook kits. They're a bit spendy, and I'm sure I'd have to do enough adapting (if it's too easy, too hard, doesn't cover everything I want to cover, etc.) that I might as well just do my own.

Edited June 27, 2011 by Kirch

[Celia]

For my ds, it's a nay. He's not the crafty sort, and unless it's enjoyable, IMHO, the time put in to it can be spent in better ways as far as educational purposes go.

 

My dd, however, will probably enjoy them. She loves colouring and cutting, and if she's chatting about the topic while she's doing it, I could see it helping her with retention. If this is something she enjoys, we'll probably do a few a year to spice things up a bit for her. I can imagine her working on a history one while listening to a SOTW audio CD. One per semester for history or science, but I certainly wouldn't do them constantly. Too time consuming to put together, and I wouldn't spend money on kits.

[Love_to_Read]

We're going to do one for my kinesthetic learner in hopes it will help with retention more than just sitting still reading/listening. However, I think we're going to reduce down the used kit I bought to just the items that seem the most meaningful (like lists that need to be memorized, a significant writing activity, a map activity), and add a few photos of *really* hands on activities...like if we decide that clothing of the time period is worth mentioning, actually creating a quick costume (Viking women need broches...what can we use...diaper pin covered with a pretty barrette?) would mean more to her than writing a canned answer on a shape book.

[kolamum]

It depends on your child's age.

 

At the Kindy level they'll need a considerable bit of help with the cutting. BUT, if you're up to it I bet it'll pay off. Think of lapbooks as fancy workbooks or note taking possibilities.

 

Your child learns something. Then your child jots down information about them inside tiny little booklets. Insane? Yes. Effective? Absolutely!

 

We did lapbooks with our guys from K - 4th. Then we moved onto notebooking. The ONLY reason we stopped lapbooking was because at the 4th grade level they have SOOOO much more to say and it doesn't fit in those booklets.

 

Lapbooks aren't for everyone. I have a child who doesn't mind having one and never minds writing in it but he hates gluing. So, I provide him with double stick tape or I keep my sticker maker loaded. Feed a booklet in and it comes out a sticker. :D Simple as.

 

Lapbooks make attractive record keeping too. ;) In Tas we have someone from the home ed council come into our homes to check out what we're doing. When the lady saw our lapbooks she was floored. She loved them.

 

Downside to lapbooks? Cutting. Pasting. Expense. In fact, you can read some great info on the pros and cons of them here.

 

All that said.. I wasn't SUPER impressed with the GG lapbook. I haven't purchased it, but it seemed really repetitive. If I owned it, though, I'd use it. :lol:

[gingersmom]

We did them in addition to everything else we learning. I would not use them as a stand alone for a subject.

 

My favorite ones were from http://www.handsofachild.com

[Joyofsixreboot]

I've tried a couple and they were misses here. Mine prefer to build something as a project.

[Mom in High Heels]

For us they are a definite yay! I've never bought anything. Mostly our books are cobbled together from various sources (homeschoolshare.com is a great place to find them for free) and sometimes I just make the booklets myself from templates easily found on the web and add a bit of clipart or let Indy draw a picture. When he was younger, they were much more labor intensive and I used more printed stuff than I do now. He writes most of the info now. If it's a simple lapbook, we might do it over the course of a week, but if it's more complicated, we'll spend several weeks on it.

We took a week of our curric this year to study Leonardo Da Vinci (Indy was fascinated by him). We read several books, including Leonardo's Horse. homeschoolshare.com has the components for Leonardo's Horse (tons and tons of information), and I printed off only the things I wanted. We focused on Leonardo and the Renaissance, instead of the horse part, but it still turned into a heck of a book.

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Indy was very interested in learning about them, so we spent a week working on a lapbook for science. You can see photos of it on my blog here. I need to put the others up! After that, we studied volcanoes and this book took us about 2 weeks. We have a space lapbook that took us over a month. One week we learned all about the moon and stars, so did the components for that. The next week we learned about the sun and galaxy and then spent 3 weeks learning about the planets. This lapbook is massive, but all the information is broken down into small easily digestible chunks. Indy loves to flip through his lapbooks to see what we learned about and look up specific information. They can be as complicated or as simple as you want them to be. It's also neat to look back at the early ones compared to the more recent to see the difference in handwriting and drawing skills. BTW, there is a lot of cutting, so we found it quicker and easier if I do the bulk of the cutting. He does some, but I'm so much faster (he's a bit of a perfectionist, so one jagged cut can back things up for a long time while he tries to fix it). Sometimes in the evenings, I'll cut stuff out while I watch TV and then it's ready to go the next day. He does all the writing and gluing though. He likes to glue. :D

[grace'smom]

We've had mixed results here. When Grace was in preschool we did a few on her favorite books and she loved them. Then we started doing them as sort of unit studies for science: gardening, birds, etc. We'd check out a TON of books from the library and read them all, then start the lapbook. Recently we got a tadpole on a frog life cycle field trip and she thought we might do another lapbook. I got on homeschool share, checked out books, etc. The thing is half finished upstairs. There weren't very many interesting books available at our library and she lost interest. Now she wants to do a Disney Princess Lapbook. I'll have to put that together myself because I don't know where to buy one and/or print it off.

 

SOOOOO.... you're kid has to really want it or you'll end up putting it together yourself or leaving it in a corner for weeks, and you have to be crafty enough to make one up on the fly if that's what you want for your child. Maybe you could do one for a unit study here and there that's more extracurricular until you get the feel for whether they really help your child.

 

I second the recommendation for Hands of A Child. The bird lapbook we got from them was stunning. Also, currclick gives out free lapbooks from Hands of A Child every once in a while as specials. We got a bee and butterfly one we haven't even done yet for free...

[tkdkidsmom]

We tried it, but I could not get the kids excited. They groaned everytime I pulled the stuff out to work on. I thought it would be great fun. What do I know. This year we will try our hand at notebooking and see how that goes.

[Mrs Twain]

Wow--I will have to give an alternative viewpoint. My kids LOVE doing lapbooks, even the non-crafty one. I have found it to be the best way to solidify information, especially history. We have also done lapbooks on animals (the free butterfly lapbook from homeschoolshare is great), and as scrapbooks after road trips. This year we will be doing one per month, alternating doing a history lapbook one month and one of the kids' choice the next. They usually choose an animal as the subject.

 

I have mostly used the free, pre-prepared lapbooks, though I often add more worksheets or pictures to them, or add extra things the children have written or illustrated. My kids love these, are very proud of the finished products, and show them (i.e. give oral presentations) to everyone who comes over to our house.

 

Skills and benefits they gain from doing lapbooks include fine motor skills (cutting, pasting, etc.), learning lists of facts from their studies, writing, summarizing, writing captions and titles, organizing information logically in a report, vocabulary practice, and practice giving oral presentations. Every time the kids show someone their lapbook (Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Grandma, etc.), they are reviewing the information they learned. My kids don't realize they are learning all of these things because they think making a lapbook is mostly just fun.

 

I am not a crafty person AT ALL, and I find lapbooks to be an easy way to satisfy my crafty kids. I also love the way that they fold up into a compact, file folder-sized packet so that many of them can be easily stored long-term on a shelf or in a drawer. Large crafty projects may be fun to make, but I never know what to do with them--put them in a closet or covertly recycle? Since lapbooks take up vey little space and are easy to store, my kids can keep them forever.

 

In other words, I am a huge fan of lapbooks (as if you couldn't tell) and have seen great academic benefits for all of my kids from doing them.

Edited June 27, 2011 by Mrs Twain

[mom2scouts]

I thought they looked like fun, but my 8 year old son had no interest. We tried a few and not one got completed. I may try some simple ones with my younger dd because she seems to have a different learning style.

[morosophe]

I would like to add: Don't forget the scrapbooking portion of lapbooks. While the mini books may add the "Wow!" factor, there's no reason you can't also include index cards filled with information from your children (e.g., a memory verse that pertains to the subject, or an important term and its definition) and just glue them straight to the file folder. Or you could cut out something written on lined paper--if you have pinking shears or scrapbooking scissors, this can look very interesting. Plus, you could trim with nifty paper or ribbon, etc. If your child is very confident in his or her writing, why not let him or her try writing directly onto the file folder to talk about the relationship of two separate elements? (For instance, in a lapbook on the solar system, you could have an arrow going from the minibook on Mercury to the one on Mars, saying something like "is smaller than", and continue that chain all the way to Jupiter, or the sun.)

 

Notebooking and lapbooking are not geometrically opposed ideas, to me--they're more like a continuum, with plenty of room to "meet in the middle," particularly if you think of it as more of a scrapbook with the occasional mini-book.

 

That said, I have been doing more straight notebooking this year with my son, although he really liked lapbooking last year. It does get a little time-intensive for the teacher!

[Hedgehogs4]

Yea for us. However, I say that with some reservation. I do not like "plug and play" lap books. I like the ones that we make ourselves, from scratch. We have used them as very effective learning tools for our history studies. We choose the areas we want to emphasize, choose our own template patterns for the mini-books, choose what we want to include in the mini-books.

[MelanieM]

Yea for us. However, I say that with some reservation. I do not like "plug and play" lap books. I like the ones that we make ourselves, from scratch. We have used them as very effective learning tools for our history studies. We choose the areas we want to emphasize, choose our own template patterns for the mini-books, choose what we want to include in the mini-books.

 

This is my prefered style as well. However, I'm finding that the plug and play ones are more likely to actually get done. This past week I've been downloading and preparing components from lapbooks at Homeschool share, doing the cutting while I watch television, and putting everything in a ziploc baggie so my daughter can pull the pieces, do the research and assemble the lapbooks at her leisure. I'm hoping this will satisfy the crafty urge (as a previous poster mentioned) in a productive way that doesn't lead to a lot of useless things laying around. (I love practical crafts and art projects, but am not a fan of kid crafts that do nothing more than take up space.)

 

We're also doing a blend of lapbooking and notebooking, and I'm considering pulling eveything together on cardstock in binders rather than using file folders. But we'll likely see what the kidlet wants to do on that front and take it from there.

 

My 6 yo has asked to do a lapbook as well, but I'm not sure if his interest is anything more than wanting to do what big sister is doing. We're going to work together on a small book about beavers and see how he likes it.

 

All that said... overall I would have to say it's a yay for us. The kids are proud of the ones we have completed, and seem to enjoy the process. The biggest downfall is definitely the upfront work for Mama if the kidlets aren't up for all their own prep. I find it helps to be in a busy-work mode and just zip through a bunch of cutting at once and have it all laid out and ready to go.

[Hedgehogs4]

This is my prefered style as well. However, I'm finding that the plug and play ones are more likely to actually get done. This past week I've been downloading and preparing components from lapbooks at Homeschool share, doing the cutting while I watch television, and putting everything in a ziploc baggie so my daughter can pull the pieces, do the research and assemble the lapbooks at her leisure. I'm hoping this will satisfy the crafty urge (as a previous poster mentioned) in a productive way that doesn't lead to a lot of useless things laying around. (I love practical crafts and art projects, but am not a fan of kid crafts that do nothing more than take up space.)

 

We're also doing a blend of lapbooking and notebooking, and I'm considering pulling eveything together on cardstock in binders rather than using file folders. But we'll likely see what the kidlet wants to do on that front and take it from there.

 

 

 

Yes...it sounds as if we have a very similar style. I think the combo of notebooking / lapbooking is what we are going to do this year as well. I don't like having a notebook with all the "boring" stuff like copywork and dictations on a subject, with a separate lap book. I'd like to pull it all together.

 

I don't attempt to do a lapbook for every little thing--rather, we work on them very slowly--maybe one mini-book / major component per week. Then at the end of a term we spend a day assembling it and reviewing all the things we learned. Then it's a "Wow! Look we've done!" I keep everything stored in a big ziplock baggie as we go so things don't get scattered around.

[mhaddon]

I love the idea of lapbooks. I printed and tried to force my DS that isn't very crafty and that doesn't like to write too much. Bad idea. So, I have FX that one day one of my girls will like to do them. I think they are neat, but not worth doing for my own sanity right now.

 

I would also say I disagree about the kit from someone that just doesn't have enough time to always sit down and put it all together. It is easier just to chuck out one piece and make up your own than do it all if you have a larger family. You can also find free ones to try out first.

[purplemama]

We have tried to do two (neither was completed), and they seem to take more time than they are worth. I end up spending more time on one subject than I intend to. It is a lot of busy work--either for you or your child--unless you buy premade ones. I haven't found premade ones that I can a) afford or b0cover a topic I am willing to do a lapbook on.

[SnMomof7]

My children adore lapbooks. I have a bit of a hard time keeping track of the work flow if we take any break from them though - they can end up in a folder for months and months and months because of my mental 'roadblock', so I need to GOGOGO on them until they are done. Thankfully my oldest has started doing hers pretty independently now - even in her free time - if I provide her with age appropriate ones :).

[calandalsmom]

My 6.5 yr old dd loves them. My boys (11 and 14)hate them.

[Runningmom80]

Where do you buy them preassembled?

[Moniksca]

love, love, love them. We use them extensively for science. We also notebook for science and history as well. My ds9 hates cutting so I do all of that for him, since I have just one student I don't mind. I also started one on Thomas the Train for my ds3 which he's enjoying as well, I got it from this site 1+1+1=1. I do all the cutting and pasting for him. My ds9 doesn't colour, he hates it and just doesn't like doing it. He still loves his lapbooks.

[Mommy22alyns]

I tried a free one a while back and it was a nay here. I'm thinking of trying another since they're older now.

[BetterthanIdeserve]

love, love, love them. We use them extensively for science. We also notebook for science and history as well. My ds9 hates cutting so I do all of that for him, since I have just one student I don't mind. I also started one on Thomas the Train for my ds3 which he's enjoying as well, I got it from this site 1+1+1=1. I do all the cutting and pasting for him. My ds9 doesn't colour, he hates it and just doesn't like doing it. He still loves his lapbooks.

 

Thanks so much for sharing. I think I'll make the Thomas one for my 3yo tomorrow! He desperately wants to do his own school work while big sis is doing school but of course he isn't interested in workbook pages. This looks perfect for him.