Today has been really productive for me and my third grade homeschooler. I took time out from my regular WAHM routine and focused on working with Bea on her English lapbook. Since we are still waiting for our Science and Math books, we were able to finish our first quarter lessons for English last week, and as our output for the quarter, we decided to make a lapbook of lessons we have covered for the period.
Pictured below is our project we decided to call Bea’s English Garden. Remember that we have lots of left over flower cut outs from the Teachers’ Day cards? We originally planned of putting them to good use with this project, but like any other plan, changes happen. We stuck with the garden theme, but better ideas came up as we were working on the components.
All the papers we used in this project were from our binder of printed lectures and activity notes from the past years. We really have used so much bond paper in the past two years that I promised to just re-use them this year. And do you know how much broken crayola can accumulate in 6 years? That’s another item that I’m not buying this year. And maybe in two more years. Ha ha! I collected all the broken (and some still whole) crayolas around the house and I was able to fill Xia’s old lunchbox with them.
Bea worked so hard on this project, staying up late in her excitement to finish the whole thing. She applied the trick she learned from Ate Xia, that of rubbing off the color with tissue paper after applying it on the drawing. The effect is a glossy finish and really even coloring. It really helped that she is ambidextrous, as she had to cut out all the mango fruits, 48 of them, and then writing 5 examples for each of the 8 types of nouns we have covered. She would start to say, “I’m tired,” but she would still push herself to work on it, simply transferring the pen from her left hand to the right.
In creating this lapbook, we went through the process of agreeing on a theme, and then brainstorming on the components that would form part of that theme. After deciding on the garden theme, we listed down all the things that we’d like to see in our garden. The mango tree was the first to be put up, and so I thought, “there goes the garden, now it will be just a tree.” I was thinking that maybe we’ll just put everything in different branches. But then she wanted to have the clouds and the butterflies and the flowers. So I made her line drawings of everything and she took care of coloring and writing down the topics.
I’d say that mounting the garden has been a resounding success and really quite a great way of completing our first quarter for English.
Marge, also known as The Happy WAHM, is a virtual assistant who turned her passion for entrepreneurship into a worthy endeavor of offering complete business solutions to CEOs and business owners around the world. She turned her back on a thriving corporate career to become a hands-on mom and created a lifestyle that allowed her to build a homebased career, homeschool her children, and still have time to pursue her passion for arts and crafting.
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