Fridays with Jimmie...lapbooking

I never expected to find myself homeschooling and was suddenly thrust into this "foreign" world...

I remember a friend recommending the blog Jimmie's Collage.  Desperate for any

means of support and encouragement, I stumbled onto what was probably my very first blog.

Jimmie didn't know me, but she suddenly became a friend and support through her

wealth of information and creative ideas.

I found myself scouring her site and studying her lapbooks.....what an amazing 

way to teach my kids.  I remember thinking...why don't they do this in schools??

I recently contacted Jimmie and was totally humbled and honored when she agreed to

write a series of guest posts here.

You will find her down-to-earth...incredibly talented....and a wealth of information

to aid in your homeschooling journey!

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Lapbooks are a collection of folding minibooks all centered on a unifying topic and affixed 

to a file folder. Here are some photos to give you an idea of what they are. 

You can find many more photos at my Lapbooks Flickr collection.

Some homeschool moms have their children make a lapbook for everything they

study. Others use lapbooks only for history or only for literature. There are special

lapbooking kits you can purchase, or you may choose the DIY route and start from scratch.

Whatever your approach to lapbooking, there are real educational benefits to

this educational method. Lapbooking is far more than just a cute papercraft.

I have narrowed down the benefits of lapbooking into four main areas. For this

post, I will discuss only one – the most valuable one. 

Lapbooking Benefit #1: Concrete Ways to Organize Information

The primary benefit of lapbooking is that it teaches children how to organize

information in very concrete ways that they can see and touch. 
Consider this lapbook on opera.

Inside it are minibooks dealing with different aspects of opera that my daughter studied:

-the first opera
-composer verses librettist
-performers in an opera
-famous opera composers
-operas versus musicals
-famous operas
-parts of an opera

Each chunk of information is neatly divided into its own minibook. Inside each  minibook that 
information is further divided, often with physical representations of pages, special folds, or moving parts.


 In my next post, I will show you how minibooks make ideas easier to understand and remember!

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Next Friday Jimmie is going to show us how she uses mini-books to create a 

physical scaffold for the information in her lapbooks!  


 

 


Jimmie Lanley is the mother of one creative twelve year old daughter. Jimmie's Collage is where she blogs about her Charlotte Mason styled homeschool. The Notebooking Fairy features free 
notebooking printables and how-tos plus the affordable eBook guide Notebooking Success.