Lapbooking. Yeah, I'd never heard of it either...

They say you learn something new every day. I firmly believe this is true. For me, my latest revelation is something called "lapbooking." Depending on what kind of homeschool parent you are, you may have already heard of this or be familiar with the concept. If you are new and haven't read a gazillion books you may not have. It was totally new to me. When I was in college learning to teach, apparently this wasn't one of the things they taught at my school. But I discovered that I am not alone. I have found several "brick and mortar" teachers that have never heard of this.

So, now after talking to a few friends and watching 17 videos on Youtube, I am now a self proclaimed expert on making lapbooks. What? I made one. AND it was double sided. So there! I watched all these tutorials on youtube and to be quite honest, they were a little hard to understand or kinda lacking in information. I mean, it's really not rocket science or anything, but hey, I didn't know how to do it at first either. So, anyway, I have decided to share my vast wisdom with you. Mind you, my vast wisdom will be this tutorial in its entirety at this point, but that's the lay of it.

First, you take a file folder and cut the tab thingies off. Yes, thingie is the appropriate term (I looked it up).

Next you take each side of the folder and fold it in toward the middle (you know, where the crease of the original folder is).

To do a double sided lapbook, you do this to two folders.

Then I used spray adhesive to attach the folders to each other, center to center.

Next you staple each of the corners together on the center of the folder. Don't worry about the staples scratching little hands. We are going to cover them up in a sec.

I was told to add a piece of card stock to the center part. This gives the lapbook stability and keeps it from bending at the middle. However, since this was a double sided book, I decided to trim a piece of construction paper and use it instead.

Finally I added my insides. The accordion folds I did myself and these are now filled with pictures of things that make the short "a" sound. The center has handwriting paper on it so that she can create her own word list and the right side has a fun little foldable that when finished spells sixteen different words with the short "a" sound. The center contains a flower where we will be pasting a photo of something we find in our home with the short "a" sound and each petal of the flower will contain more "a" words. The foldables were downloaded from www.flapjackbooks.com and they have several different types of foldables and lapbooks on there to assist you.

You don't have to be crafty to make a lapbook. You don't need a lot of time or money either. I have a box full of hanging files in bright colors that we are going to be using this year. I'm going to cut the metal bars off and use them for our science lapbooks. We will be purchasing our lapbooking materials for that from www.rainbowresources.com as they have pretty much anything we need in that respect.

If you have a "hand on" learner that needs constant stimulation and needs to be busy all the time, lapbooks are a great way to keep them engaged. I went from spending the summer trying to teach my hands on learner the short "a" sound to watching her grasp it fully in just a few short days using her lapbook.

Kinda makes me frustrated that I never knew about this when I had a classroom.