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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Creation Lapbook

Well since we've read through 2 children's Bibles now and have done another children's devotional book, I was looking for something different to read or do that covers basic Bible stories. I decided to search the internet and look for online devotionals, but instead came across an absolutely WONDERFUL website called Christian Preschool Printables. It's geared toward early childhood/Pre-K & Kindergarten and has a fantastic amount of resources and activities. I love this site!!! After doing a couple of Creation activities with the little Cutlet, I ventured out a bit and decided to try a lapbook, which Christian Preschool Printables has linked to. What is a lapbook?!? Well I'm just figuring it out myself. In a nutshell, it's a manila file folder with the flaps folded inward toward the middle crease in order to make a "book" which easily rests on your lap. This book is a representation of a particular unit of study, such as Creation in our case. It can hold a wide variety of informative snippits that can subsequently be used for review of the topic... or the lapbook itself can be used to introduce a topic. We found this cool Creation lapbook among a few other Bible lapbooks that are available at the Lapbook Lessons website. This site is dedicated purely to lapbooks!!! You can view uploaded completed projects of other homeschoolers as well as peruse a wide variety of uploaded videos of samples or how-tos. With my bent toward scrapbooking and paper crafts, this is lots of fun for me! However, I want it to be a learning tool for the little ones, so I'll have to continue to evaluate whether its value is merited in this regard as we venture out and try a few more... In the meantime, enjoy the result of Cutlet's (and my!) first lapbook...
Cover: He drew a picture of himself in the "me" cloud, Daddy, me, Lively (playing on the floor) and himself in the "my family" cloud, and water, fish, a boat, a tree with a snake, a cross and a bird in the "the world" cloud.


Inside: On the left flap is the Creation worksheet (folded in thirds to fit), the Days of Creation mini-book at the bottom, and a few things he wanted to stamp! On the right flap is his little section about himself. The bottom of this section is "my favorite number", "my favorite food", "my favorite animal", and "my favorite color". The middle section has a really cool Creation Wheel I found a link to. It spins around and shows the days of creation. The rest of the page is filled with stickers & stamps of animals and things of creation found in the water, on land and in air.


This is his drawing of his favorite food: FISH!















Cutlet's favorite animal? ... A SHARK!!!
This is a representation of himself. He LOVES "Calichines" (or sports) shirts, so he had to draw number 4 on his shirt :-) ... that's his favorite number, just like me!








Following is the back side of the lapbook. he drew his hand (complete with a ring on his finger and freckles on his arm!). I attached the world he colored and the words to the song He's got the whole world in His hands...

And that's it!

A lapbook project can take a few minutes or a few days, depending on how intricate and elaborate you want to make it. We enjoyed doing this project a little bit at a time over about 3 days, the bulk of it being completed during the 24-hour period we were without electricity here and there was little else to do!!!