My Montessori Journey: Thanksgiving Lapbooks--Part 1

I have been wanting to do lapbooks with my boys for quite a while now. I often look at the blogs of homeschooling moms and have seen lapbooks on several of them. (BTW.....you may not realize this, but I am kind of a homeschool wanna-be.........I am really happy with the school situation for both of our boys, but I also frequently have little homeschool "fantasies" in my head which usually involve me being able to sleep in ever so slightly every morning after which I head outside to milk our (currently non-existent) cows, then use the milk to churn butter with the boys, etc.........like I said, pure fantasy and I'm digressing!) ANYWAY...........I decided to dive into the lapbook thing and have each of the boys make a Thanksgiving lapbook. I was greatly inspired by this post at the 1+1+1=1 blog. After reading that post and checking out what Carisa (the blog author) had done with her son, I decided to give it a go. Today I am posting the lapbook my oldest son made. He is 7. Tomorrow I will post about the one my 3 1/2 year-old did.

Here is the front of my oldest son's lapbook. I was going to do a fancy fold with the file folder, but found that using it "as is" worked better for the projects I had for him. I printed the turkey shown on the cover from DLTK. He used some of my scrapbooking stamps to stamp "Thanksgiving" on the front.

Here is the inside of his book with the flap folded down. I needed more room than just one file folder so I cut a second folder in half and taped it to the inside at the top. That is the "flap" with the colored turkey on it. I printed this turkey from Kaboose. The ABC order cut and paste was a worksheet from Enchanted Learning that I cut apart so it would fit better into the book.

This shows a close-up of the inside left page of the lapbook. The Syllable Matching with Thanksgiving words worksheet was also printed from Enchanted Learning (I have a membership which is required to be able to print these pages.)

This photo shows the lapbook with the flap "up". On the underside of the flap is a Thanksgiving crossword puzzle printed from DLTK. The Thanksgiving maze is from Kaboose (they had several versions in varying difficulty levels; I printed an easier one for my younger son's lapbook). The First Thanksgiving mini-book was printed from Teacher Vision. I am not a member of this website, but it looks like you can print up to 3 items for free. The little orange pocket has a folded up math worksheet that I printed from KidZone. There are many different free math worksheets available at this site. You can see the unfolded paper in the photo below.

This photo shows the back of my oldest son's lapbook. The puzzle was printed from DLTK......there are several puzzles available for printing in various difficulty levels.

My oldest son enjoyed doing his lapbook very much. He wanted to pretty much do all the activities in one sitting. As I've looked at the lapbooks of other moms and teachers, I would say that this lapbook was more about "fun" than actual learning. It was our first attempt at lapbooking and my purpose, more than anything, was to give him a variety of Thanksgiving theme-related activities to do. However, I am already thinking ahead to the type of lapbook we could do for Thanksgiving next year that would include more research and learning about the first Thanksgiving and the Mayflower voyage.

In tomorrow's post I will include a bunch of links I've found for free lapbook resources on the good ol' 'net!