Three lapbooks: Weather, Obedience, and Money
We have been having so much fun learning lately! I am really enjoying doing the unit studies this year, and using lapbooks to keep it all organized.
In September we started with a study on weather. We checked out tons of weather books from the library and read “The Wizard of Oz”(you know, the tornado!) as our novel. The kids also got to watch the movie (but I fast-forwarded all the scary parts). Instead of purchasing a ready-made lapbook, I made this one up. Here is what we put in it:
Instruments to measure the weather, layers of the atmosphere, types of clouds, definitions, cumulonimbus clouds, lots of questions/answers from a weather game, some paper dolls to dress up in correct clothes for the weather, types of lighting, safety during lightning, two poems (Clouds by Christina Rosetti and The Wind by Robert Louis Stevenson), winter weather (blizzards, snowflakes, frostbite and hypothermia), types of precipitation, rainbows (colored in the correct color order), Scripture that speaks of weather, how to forecast the weather, hurricanes, how to draw rain and wind, copywork of weather folklore, the four seasons, the water cycle, tornado safety and a temperature graph. It didn’t work out to visit a weather center, but we did find one online. It was a video of a virtual tour of a weather center in Kentucky!
Next, we did a lapbook and study on Biblical Obedience. (This one was from Hands of a Child. You can get it at CurrClick.)
We used the study for our daily Bible Time scripture reading. We read about Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, Jesus staying at the Temple at age 12 and many other stories about obedience (and disobedience). I especially loved the cartoons my boys drew of the Fiery Furnace story! The boys did lots of verses for memorization and copywork, such as Col. 3:20, Acts 5:29, Phil 2:14-15, Eph. 4:32, Eccl.12:13, Deut. 6:5, Ex.20:12, I Sam. 12:24, Ezek.36:27, Psalm 100, I Kings 22:13, and Lev 19:18. We found a great list of 10 ways to test obedience. Here are a few of the things we learned: accept no as the final answer, act on commands immediately, cheerfully obey, find a way to overcome obstacles, no complaining, and put all your energy into the task. The study hasn’t done away with all our problems with obedience, of course. We’re in training mode; it will take a long time. But it’s helped.
Then we turned our attention to the study of money! This was another lapbook that I made up myself. I found several printables online of pictures of money. I also had a couple of workbook sheets that the boys did and a neat activity about Pieces of Eight that we found online. We read Larry Burkett’s “Money Matters for Kids,” learned about tithing (and how to calculate it) and did Copywork of the following scriptures: Eccl. 5:1, Heb. 13:5, Mal. 3:8, I Tim. 6:10, and Matt. 6:24. We also talked about taxes, banks and ATMs. We saw a virtual tour online of a mint where they make coins. The boys did lots of math with this study (fractions, 10 percent, counting by 5s and 10s, and counting money). We still need to visit a bank so that the four younger kids can open savings accounts. There is so much more we could’ve done with this money study, but November came: time for Thanksgiving and Pilgrims!
