Lapbooks...

Okay, first let me say that I have some incredible friends who are amazing homeschoolers. I myself; not so much. I gladly send Ayden off on the big yellow bus every morning and welcome him back with open arms every afternoon.

I love the idea of homeschooling but I've never felt very adequate as a homeschool mom. A few times I've wondered if I should be homeschooling but deep down inside I still worry that I'm not structured enough or don't have enough patience. As you can see, I've opted for public school for the time being.

However, I must admit that something inside of me must have a bit of my mother's DNA (my mom is like the superstar of all teachers). For example, I LOVE looking at homeschooling blogs and I also LOVE going in the teacher stores!

Recently I was on the most amazing homeschool blog known to man and I came across "lapbooks". The best way I can describe lapbooks are that you pick a topic (giraffes, George Washington, Scuba Diving; whatever). Then you make a bunch of "mini books" or small projects that relate to that topic.

For example, for giraffes you might have a "mini book" that talks about where giraffe's live and what they eat. You might also have a mini book about how tall a giraffe is and then you might decide to relate that to measurements and do a little lesson on using a ruler etc.

In the end, you put all of these little mini books together on a file folder and you end up with a "lapbook" which describes all the things you learned when you studied a giraffe.

I decided that even though I'm not feeling called to homeschool right now, it might be fun to do some lapbooks to get Ayden's mind going as summer winds down and school creeps up.

Soooo, here is our first attempt at a lapbook. We basically stole everything from my friend Carisa's blog (thanks Carisa!) and Ayden has had a blast! We are working on a lapbook about money.

Ayden already knows basic values of money and things of that nature so some of it was review for him, but the part that has been most fun has been researching some things that he didn't know about (like mints and the history of money).

We're not completely done but I'll be sure to post a picture of the finished "book" when we complete it.

In the meantime, if you're dying to do a lapbook yourself (or you just want to see a picture of a completed one), jump on over here to get all the free templates from Carisa's amazing blog!