Lapbooking ad nauseum

In an effort to wrap up our school year this week we have been doing marathon lapbooking. This is definitely not how I would recommend completing a lapbook. Lapbooks are supposed to be fun but the fun is lost when you are working for an hour or more and pushing to do one more thing. The girls have had good attitudes but I think they would have benefited more if we had done a little bit at a time over the last couple of months. Anyway, we have completed the two I recently purchased and are most of the way through the Fourth of July one that Hannah and I started a year ago.

Grace's lapbook is titled Flowers and Insects in the Garden. It was different than other lapbooks we've done. For one thing, this was way too easy. We created more of an interactive lapbook than one that gives information. There is a flower memory game, matching the number words to the number, reading the color names on a caterpillar. I wish I would have researched it more but oh well. It is cute and she is the type of kid who will play the games in it over and over. We used a tri-fold board for this lapbook and for the Mary Cassatt one. We usually do file folders but I felt like trying something different. I let the girls paint them a couple of weeks ago to make them look a bit more colorful. I really like how they turned out.

This lapbook above and below is the one that we started last summer. It is all about the Fourth of July and our flag. I thought it would be a good way to top off our studies of the United States. We've got all the little books in but have only filled out half of them. We will be working on it the next couple of days.

Then there's Mary Cassatt. Mary Cassatt is one of my favorite artists and one of Hannah's as well. She was an impressionist and showed her work with Degas, Renoir, and Monet. She has a lot of mother and child pictures that are just precious. This lapbook had a lot of writing and it was a little more than Hannah likes to do. She would have enjoyed it more if we could have taken more time on it. She did enjoy it though and learned quite a bit. We both did. At the homeschool convention I bought a small book of stickers with artwork by Mary Cassatt. We were able to use them to liven up this lapbook and add some color. In the same little kit there were Mary Cassatt tattoos. Nothing like a little fine art tatooed to your arm. How corny is that??? We haven't used them yet but I'll take pictures when we do.