Lapbooks for Learning – How Do I Start?

Anette Rogers
There are a number of ways to go about incorporating lapbooks into your homeschool curriculum. Your starting point and methodology will depend on how you operate best, and on your own childrens’ learning styles. Following are some things to consider before you plunge in.

In the process of making a lapbook, you will complete four basic steps: choosing a topic, making the minibooks and fold-outs, gluing them into the layer book foundation, and entering the information. There is considerable discussion among veteran lapbookers about ordering those steps; which to do first, how much to do in the course of each step, and when to put it all together. The general conclusion is that how you proceed will depend on your childrens’ interest levels, learning styles, and fine motor skills.

Choosing a topic

Very simply, a lapbook topic can be – anything. It can be Spanish vocabulary. It can be English grammar. It can present the long division algorithm, step by step. It can cover a science or history topic you are studying. It can be built around a story or book. It can be used to review textbook chapters, pulling out important points for review. It can be an animal, a state, insects, volcanoes, coral reefs. Topics may be narrow enough to need only two sides of a piece of cardstock, or broad enough to fill a folder with multiple pages. It is an excellent way to present something a particular child might be having trouble with – simplifying fractions, for instance, or remembering verb tenses, or learning the vowel sounds. This simple type of lapbook can be completely quickly, perhaps taking the place of a math or grammar lesson for the day.

If you are just beginning lapbooking with multiple children, you may want to have everyone working on the same topic. If you have three children and they choose three different subjects, you may find yourself on overload, trying to come up with appropriate information, pictures, stickers, etc. for different subjects. Once you’ve done a few, and the children can proceed more independently, it might work for them to choose their own topics. Obviously, younger children are going to need more help. They may need words or sentences written out to copy, for instance, rather than composing their own. When older students become familiar with the whole process, however, they may very well be able to strike out on their own and end up with a well-done lapbook. But begin slowly, and choose topics simple enough to produce a satisfying end product in a reasonable amount of time – not one your kids never want to see again!

How to proceed

You may well have to experiment a little to find out the best way to continue, once you have chosen a topic. The remaining three steps – making the minibooks, gluing them in, and entering information – can be approached in a number of ways.

Consider first what your children enjoy doing. Some kids love to sit down with scissors and paper and “craft” away. They will happily sit encircled by little bits of colored paper and make minibooks by the dozen, improvising and customizing as they go. Then there are those who will make a few, lose interest, and wander off. And there are the ones who will be driven crazy by the whole scene and cooperate only under duress. (Those are probably your “workbook” students, who prefer tidy pages to fill out – and there’s nothing wrong with that!)

One procedure is to do-it-as-you-go: construct a single minibook, enter the information, pictures, stickers, etc., store it in a ziplock bag, and go on to the next one. The advantage of this method is that your children will have a finished product in a short time – a fun little manipulative minibook or fold-out they made themselves. When several are done, they can be laid out on the foundation folder and glued in. The children can arrange the layout themselves, or they can follow given instructions.

Another method is to make a variety of blank minibooks, glue them all onto the foundation, then find and enter information. Younger or more inexperienced children, however, may become overwhelmed with the whole cutting and folding process. It can be a fairly challenging activity if it’s done for too long at a time, or if the fold-outs are too complex. By the time you get to the actual information the children may have lost interest.

A supply of minibooks and fold-outs can be made ahead of time for the children to choose from and use as they wish. There is always the possibility that they will be inspired to try their own at some point. You could perhaps provide some premade ones for part of the lapbook, and then require them to construct their own for the last page or two.

If you’re just starting lapbooking and your kids can’t figure out what on earth is going on, it might help to complete a whole example for them, then lead them through it step by step. Do keep it simple, though. The most engaging activity loses its luster if it goes on too long.

In any case, prepared materials should probably at least include paper cut to sizes and shapes that lend themselves to minibooks. A whole lapbooking center can be set up, with manila folders, cardstock, paper in a variety of colors and sizes, pre-folded minibooks, markers, crayons, glue sticks, tape, stickers, etc. The heavy plastic file bins made to hold suspended folders work well to store colored paper because their contents are visible and easily accessible. Plastic storage boxes work well for smaller cuts of paper and other supplies.

How long should it take to make a layer book?

Here is another one of those questions with an ambiguous answer: as long as you want it to. Your answer will probably depend on the breadth of your topic, the ages of your students, how often you work on it, and your purpose in lapbooking. If you’re covering a broad topic, such as the Oregon Trail, for example, you might be working on it for several weeks. If you want to present a specific, single idea or concept using a lapbook, it can be put together in one session. If you work on your lapbooks daily, obviously they will be completed sooner than if you work on them once a week.

Sources of information

The internet, of course, is the perfect tool for lapbooking. Any subject can be accessed quickly and easily, bits of information can be selected and printed, and there are innumerable sources of small pictures, maps, and free clip art. Scrapbooking sites are usually good sources of lapbook material, as well as educational sites.

However, don’t overlook the opportunities a lapbook presents for small bites of writing practice. Your students can look up and copy definitions. They can write short paragraphs or stories on a 3x5 cards, or in blank books made from two or three half-sheets of paper folded in half. You can incorporate copywork or dictation in the form of sentences or short passages from a book. Younger students can copy vocabulary words.

The same goes for artwork. Whatever other resources you have in the form of stickers, clip art, etc., be sure to also include original drawings, complete with captions and explanations.

And don’t forget to pull in little bits of grammar, geography, math, and other subjects that might not be directly related to the lapbook topic. Your students can highlight nouns and verbs, for instance, in a paragraph they have entered. They can locate the natural habitats of wild animals, birds, insects, or plants on a map. They can graph the distances of the planets from Earth. All these activities can easily find a place on a lapbook page.

Of course the basic life principle start somewhere applies very aptly here. Anywhere is better than nowhere. Try lapbooking, learn from it, have fun with it, and rest assured that your children are learning, probably more than either you or they realize.

Copyright © 2007 Anette Rogers