Colonial Lapbooks are finished!!

The colonial lapbooks are finished! The older 3 children did a great job on them. For those of you who may not know, lapbooks are "books" made out of file folders with small fold-it booklets glued inside. Each smaller fold-it will have some specific information in it on what the children have learned on a certain topic. This has been a wonderful way for our kids to "show what they know" and for me to use as an evaluation tool as well (how much they are retaining). We typically make one or two fold-its per week and then put them all together in the file folder at the very end of each unit.

The fold-its for these lapbooks were primarily taken from the colonial lapbook CD that Knowledge Box Central sells. But we didn't use all the ones included on the CD and we made up a few of our own. We went through a few super busy weeks where we made no fold-its, so our finished products are just one full file folder in size, with half a file folder cut and taped along one side to make a large fold out page. In other words, a total of 3 pages.

It would be over-kill to show pictures of every child's lapbook, so I've included detailed photos of just our oldest child's lapbook. She is very particular in how she likes things, so she put all the fold-its in where she wanted them, even if they weren't in chronological order. :-) She is 10 years old and in the fifth grade. I required her to fill every page of every fold-it with as much information as she could fit on it. Our 8 year old had to write at least two sentences on each fold-it, and our 7 year old had to write just one. If there was more than one sentence worth of pertinent information, I did the rest of the writing for him.

Here is her cover, finished except for the coloring.

When you open it up, you see the flap of the extra page on the right side.

Here it is with the extra flap opened up, so you can see all 3 pages of fold-its.

On the first page she has a colonial quilt, a map labeling the 13 colonies, a picture of a ship with the names of the 3 ships who brought the original colonists to Jamestown written on its sail, and a "who were the Puritans?" fold-it.

This is the quilt fold-it, opened up.

And the map fold-it, opened up. It shows the northern colonies, middle colonies, and southern colonies in different colors.

This is the 3rd page, the extra fold out page. It has a colonial jobs matching game, and 2 of our home-made flap books, one describing each of the middle colonies and the other describing each of the southern colonies.

This is the matching game up close, with the cards showing.

And this shows two pages of her middle colonies flap book, one on New York (on the top) and the other on New Jersey (on the bottom).

Here is the middle, or second page of the lapbook. It has a fold-it on William Penn, a small fold-it telling where the first Pilgrims landed, a Pocahontas flap book, and our third home-made flapbook on the northern colonies.

Here is the Pocahontas flap book opened up. She wrote out Pocahontas's life story in the form of a cartoon strip, so there are small numbers written above the text in certain places that correspond to one of the boxed pictures on the bottom of the flap. There are 3 pages to this flap-book and each one is chock full! This was a project totally self-directed and which she loved.

And last but not least, here is a page from our 7 year old's flap-book on the southern colonies. It illustrates our rule of thumb for one sentence of his writing, and the rest written by me.

I am so glad these are DONE! They are fun to look at and are great tools for remembering all we have studied since September. They will be proudly on display at our unit celebration tomorrow!