Princess Quasi-Lapbook

I saw this Preschool Pack over at 1+1+1 a while back and downloaded it for use with Miss O. She has loads of them on her site, so be sure to check it out. The content is a bit easy for her, but it's fun, and she likes doing it, so I went ahead and printed it out for her. Since many of the pieces are interactive, it worked better to do more of a notebook than a lapbook.

The following pictures don't show everything included, but here's how I put it together:

Sheet protectors for using dry erase markers on:
A little velcro pouch for little pieces that can be used again and again:
She is doing tracing, sight word reading, patterns, shape recognition, number and number word recognition, plus some other good stuff with this packet. Like I said, more suited toward an older preschooler or pre-K student, but still lots of fun for a Kindy like Miss O. :)

Color Lapbook--Finally Finished

Well the color lapbook I started with Miss O ages ago is finally finished and I'm finally ready to post about it! I ended making my own pieces for a lot of this lapbook, but I am not familiar with how to share files via my blog, so if you personally want any pieces, please contact me and I can send you the ones I've made. Others I did get from off the web and have resourced those at the bottom of this post.

This lapbook was a lot of fun for everyone, including me! We did a lot of projects to suppliment the learning and also checked out some books from the library about art and color concepts. We did the warms and cool colors collage, the primary colors quilt, experimented with making secondary colors and we did some work with constrasting colors. Click the links to see our projects!

Here is the inside of our lapbook--on the left we have a basic colors mini-book, below that a book about mixing colors, and below that our constrasting colors project. In the middle we have the color wheels I made, and a color wheel resourced at the bottom of this post. On the right, another printable, check below for resources.

This is the ABC colors book, I made this myself, where we tried to think of a color name for every letter in the alphabet.

Here we used this printable (see below for resource) to do shades of colors.

This skin tones one I made myself.

And then here we have warm and cool colors, earth tones and neutral tones, all of these I made myself.

Color Mixing Mini book: http://www.tooter4kids.com/Light_Color/colorsallaroundus.htm

RoyGBiv Printable:
http://lapbooksbycarisa.homestead.com/roygbiv.with_colored_letters.pdf

Color Wheel: http://www.kidzone.ws/science/colorwheel.htm

Shades of color printable: http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-printables.html

Cover Rainbow: http://www.homeschoolhelperonline.com/worksheets/pre_school/rainbow.htm

Color Wheel pie activity: http://desktoppub.about.com/od/howcolorworks/ss/Color-Basics-Desktop-Publishing.htm

What Color Do You See? http://www.thebestcompanyever.com/Site/Mini_Books_files/Mini%20Book-Colors%20%28I%20see%29.pdf

Color Wheel Book: www.enchantedlearning.com

I am an artist book: http://files.homeschoolshare.com/docs54478/I_am_artist/art%20book.pdf

Warm and Cool Colors

Yup, we are still working on the color lapbook, and it's been so much fun! Here is a little project the kiddos did to learn about warm and cool colors.

First we got some fabric scraps from my mom, making sure to choose fairly solid colors and a variety of both warm and cool colors. We talked about warm and cool colors--what colors made them feel warm and cozy like the sun? What colors made them feel cool like ice and snow and winter mornings? They seemed to understand this intuitively. I made a lapbook tri-fold book to go along with this project since this obviously wouldn't be going into our lapbook.

Next, I cut out a big rectangle of contact paper and labeled the two sides warm and cool. The kids each had a pile of fabric scraps and sorted the fabric into the two catgories. These turned out really pretty and pleasing to the eye!

Color Activity--Secondary Colors

After learning about primary colors the other day with our color quilt, I decided to delve into secondary colors with the kids. We have covered this before, but they needed review, as they didn't really remember anything.

I set up some clear glasses with red, yellow and blue food coloring in a circular fashion. In between each primary color on the wheel was a cup of clear water. So the formation was similar to a color wheel. We then added food coloring to the clear cups, using the two colors that each cup sat between.
As we mixed the colors, Miss O used colored pencils to fill in the secondary colors on her color wheel that is already attached to her color lapbook.
They seemed to need more to really believe that the primary colors made certain other colors when mixed, so I whipped up this little worksheet right then. They liked this so much they did it twice!

I squirted a bit of red, yellow and blue paint in the rectangles to the right. Then I labeled the circles with the first letter of the color they were to paint in that circle. For the last circle, they dabbed their brush in both colors and then mixed it on the paper.

Both these and the primary color quilts are hanging on the door of our pantry. It's a good reminder for them and they tend to reference the projects when I ask them what the primary and secondary colors are or when I ask them what two colors make when mixed.

Color Activity--Background is Important

Here's another activity we did for our color lapbook--focusing on contrasting colors. This activity again came from How to Teach Art to Children.

I introduced the concept of contrasting colors by using an orange and a blue and orange piece of foam paper. We learned that background is important! You can see an object much better if the background color is much different (or contrasts with) the object.

Then I gave the kids a box of different items and some different colors of foam paper. They tried each object on the papers and decided which objects showed up best on the different colors. We learned that generally speaking, cool colors show up better on warm colored backgrounds and warm colors show up better on cool backgrounds. We will solidify this idea more later on when we talk more about warm and cool colors (looking back, I should have covered that first, but forgot!).

Later, I gave the kids several different colors of construction paper and the same colors in smaller rectangles. They experimented with contrasting the small rectangles with the bigger ones and once they were satisfied, they used a glue stick to glue their choices down. Finally, I stapled their choices into a little book.

Primary Colors Quilt

In preparation for our color lapbook, we made this little project that focuses on the primary colors. It's pretty self explanitory; all you need is a glue stick, 3 large squares of each primary color and 3 small squares of each primary color. We glued everything onto a piece of plain white paper to make our primary color quilt. This idea came from a book I have called How to Teach Art to Children. This book will be our main source for projects and information for Miss O's color lapbook, and is an excellent resource for those looking for an art curriculum for grades 1 through 6.

Human Body Lapbook

I was pulling together resources for our color lapbook this weekend and realized that I had never shared our Human Body Lapbook here. Miss O and Little Bean each did a human body lapbook, with Miss O's being a little more simplified for her age. Sometimes I combine them, but I had a ton of mini books, so we decided to do two. For our color lapbook, we will combine both of their parts into one book. By the way, I am totally excited about the color lapbook! Thank you to those who left links for me to look at--I checked them all out and did pull some stuff from there. But there were several things I could not find pre-made, so I spent Saturday trying my hand at making my own mini books, and I have to say, I am delighted with the results and can't wait to get started on this one with the kiddos! Anyway, on to the human body! I pulled all my resources for this lapbook from here. We searched our local library for books on the human body too. Unfortunately I didn't save the titles for what we used, but the lapbook pieces can be used with any books on the human body.

Here is the cover of Miss O's lapbook:
And this is the inside of Little Bean's lapbook. We have: a mini book about eye color, important body parts, a diagram of the skeleton, a mini book about how to stay healthy, and a book about the different parts of the body (skin, muscles, bones, and organs).

The skeleton page turns so that we have more room. On this page we have a book about germs and what makes people sick, a diagram of internal organs (Little Bean hasn't finished this one yet), steps to brushing your teeth, body part riddles, and a food groups chart.

Preschool Ocean Lapbook

You may have read that I recently started home preschooling a 3 year old little boy along with my two. A few weeks ago, he and I finished our first lapbook together--Ocean Animals. I got all of my printables from either Homeschool Share (where I searched for appropriate content among any of the lapbooks that were ocean themed) or from 1+1+1=1. This lapbook was a lot of fun, and I hope to do more with him in the future. Miss O and I are going to be doing a color lapbook soon (I have yet to pull my resources together for that one yet though) and Little Bean and I are doing a giant Story of the World lapbook. That one won't be done for a LONG time!

Here is the finished lapbook:

And the inside: We have words that begin with O, beginning sounds, a five senses book, a number mini-book and a coloring and dictation activity.

Here's a little coloring activity he did:
And a close up of that number mini-book:

Looking for Resources for a Color Lapbook

I am looking for resources (preferably free!) for a color lapbook. I'd like to do one with Miss O, who is 4, on things like shades of colors, the color wheel, color mixing, etc. Anyone know of something like that out there?

Amazing Story of the World Resource

As many of you know, we are using Winter Promise Hideaways in History for our history curriculum this year. We actually just finished up Volume 1 in Story of the World, which is the spine for this program (well, it used to be, but I have heard they have since changed that!). Little Bean has really enjoyed our readings in SOTW, but I have felt like there was so much information covered in such a short period of time that I wasn't ready to move on to Volume 2 with him just yet.

SO, we are starting over at the beginning of SOTW Volume 1, and to accompany it, we will be lapbooking. I googled Story of the World, Volume 1 and lapbook, and I found an amazing resource. Another homeschooling mom has done a huge, detailed lapbook already of the entire first volume, and she is offering the files (a 43 page download) for FREE! I was so blown away by the hard work she put into the lapbooking pieces, and so grateful because this will be the perfect thing for Little Bean and I to do to really review and solidify the information from SOTW. Also on her blog are activities and resources for every chapter in Story of the World Volume 1.

Take a look at her lapbook and download it here.

Frog Lapbook

Our frog lapbook is done! I used mini books from Homeschool Share for this lapbook. I couldn't find all of the recommended books listed on the site, but it worked out fine just choosing some of the frog books from our library. Miss O and Little Bean each had several books to complete and we combined them to make one big frog lapbook:
Here is the inside: Miss O helped with the coloring and she also did the two mini books you see in the center area (F is for and -og words). The center area flips up for more room. Each lily pad has a question and answer underneath that Little Bean had to fill out.
Here we have a frog lifecycle wheel and a diagram of frog body parts:
Some more lapbook pieces:
And this is the back. The tongues slide in and out. Miss O made the top one and Little Bean the bottom one:

All About Me Lapbook

Little Bean turned 5 on Easter Sunday, and with his Kindergarten year quickly coming to an end, I thought it was the perfect time for an All About Me lapbook. The parts for this particular lapbook came from Homeschool Share. Little Bean loves making lapbooks; this one was our third--first we did the Australia lapbook, then a fire fighting one, and now this one. Up next is frogs, and then I am thinking about doing the human body...but we'll see. :)

Here's the cover:

And the inside. The middle portion flips up to extend the lapbook and give us more space to work with: Here he listed or drew pictures of some of his favorite things, and on the blue strips he listed favorite books:

Recent Photo in the paper mirror:

He dictated to me about his house for this mini book:

It'd be kind of fun to repeat this lapbook yearly just to get a feel for how he's grown and changed throughout the year.

Do you lapbook with your kids? What is your favorite lapbooking resource?