Many homeschooling families use lapbooks, but it isn’t something that I have a lot of experience in. Now that I have read a review PDF copy of Lapbooking Made Simple by Heidi St. John (through Real Life Press), I now have a better understanding of lapbooking and have even used the ideas to create a few with my kids.
Laphooking Made Simple
This book comes as a PDF digital download and currently retails for $7.95. It has about 50 pages of tips, ideas, templates, and information.
At the very end, she included several mini-book templates. For each template, there was a full color version and a black and white version. I loved that versatility because sometimes I’m wanting to make something beautiful, and sometimes I just want to get the job done and not waste the colored ink from my printer. This gives a lot of versatility to actually using the templates.
The templates included at the end include 2 different styles of Life-a-Flap Booklets, Mini-File Folder Templates, 3 different Folding Booklets, a Cross-Fold Template, a Ticket Accordion template, Petal Books, Pocket Book template, Tabbed File Book template, and a Fact Wheel (the kind where you would use a metal brad fastener in the middle).
I honestly had never seen some of these before, so that was a nice surprise. Since this is an ebook, I will have all of these templates in one place to use any time I want throughout my homeschooling years. This resource alone made this book a terrific value for me!
How We Used Lapbooking Made Simple
We are doing a Native American unit study right now in our homeschool, so I was able to implement a lot of what I learned in this book with that.
The book is full of tips and great ideas that make personalizing a lapbook so easy. One tip that I love is actually her Golden Rule for Lapbooking, which says, “Your lapbook belongs to your child. Don’t take over and do it for him.”
Well, you don’t have to tell me twice! I love being able to put the burden, err… responsibility, of learning on my older kids. Honestly, though, they learn SO much more when I am not in their way. Lapbooking works well because it allows them to save and recite information they find important and interesting.
Instead of taking over and telling them every little thing, they were able to have the freedom to record information that stuck out to them. Believe me, when you tell a kid to write down a certain number of things related to a specific topic, it is surprising how fast they can come up with information. Compared to just asking them to tell you that many things in a regular conversation or review type scenario, somehow the lapbooking brings the knowledge out of them!
Final Thoughts of Lapbooking Made Simple
This is a great resource for any homeschool parent that is interested in learning more about and possibly implementing lapbooking into their studies. It gives you ideas on how to make them and on integrating them into what your children are already learning.
There are many ways presented that show off the versatility of lapbooking, especially if you are already doing unit studies. It also shows you how to use lapbooks to disguise reports.
This will come in handy for us, since my 2nd grade son hates the tedious task of typing or writing up all sorts of information on school topics. By breaking it up into small bits and pieces on a lapbook and making it fun and interesting, he can much more easily express what he knows about the topic than if I were to give him a certain expectation of paragraphs or pages to write!
I recommend this ebook as it takes the overwhelming topic of lapbooking and truly simplifies it. I love the colorful pictures and templates included as well, because I am very visual and have to see what she is talking about instead of just reading about it. She has taken the researching out of it and has everything you need all in one place, including links to other resources that she has hand-picked as the most helpful. You can’t beat that!
