Alphabet Notebook

I'm pretty sure H3's favorite part of homeschool is on Friday when we add a new page to her Alphabet Notebook. She also loves to show her book off to family members and friends and occasionally takes it off the shelf just to look at it herself. The idea and almost everything we include in the book comes from Homeschool Share.
My favorite part about the 'A' page is going through her mini book of 'Things that start with A' booklet and hearing H3 say 'astronaut'. It's too cute.


We just so happened to have some cute bear patterned fabric for this page.


The site suggested use cornmeal for the textured C, but I only had an oatmeal....I know, it doesn't begin with a C, but it was fun anyway.


The D is made from denim...yup, that one begins with the featured letter!


H3 practiced writing her E's.


This one was really fun. We traced H3's foot for her foot book and decorated 'Four, Fat, Funny Fish'.



An accordion book features G words.

A pretty picture of H3 on the H page.


Yes, that's chicken pox all over the letter I. Why? Because he 'itches', of course. The site suggested dabbing the red dots with calamine lotion, but we didn't have any...does that make me a bad mother?



The Jack and Jill puppets were a HUGE hit!

And finally the K page...we've done a few more pages since I last took pictures of it...it's a work in progress but has really helped to reinforce the letters we're learning.

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Pocahontas Lapbook

We concluded our studies on Jamestown and Pocahontas at the end of October, but I'm just now getting around to posting the pictures of the lapbook we completed. We read both Pocahontas by D'Aulaire and Jamestown from The Adventures in Colonial America Series. Our lapbook componets came from HomeschoolShare's free Pocahontas lapbook.


I found this map of Powhatan's Indian village while surfing the internet. I didn't save the site so I'm not sure where it came from.


All the kids worked together to make this lapbook, each one making different booklets.




Mapping Jamestown.


Pocahontas marries John Rolfe.


How the Indians help the Englishmen and the gifts that were given to Chief Powhatan from the King og England (his 'Royal Brother').


Pocahontas saves John Smith's life twice.




Even the little ones help with the lapbook, practicing letters. Pin It Now!

All About E5

Isn't it a marvel how all children are different? It took one week of homeschooling for me to realize that the phonics program I used with the oldest two was not going to work for E5. I guess I could have made it work...but that would've caused lots of stress and tears (on both of our parts). And since one of my goals for this year is that there will no crying in homeschool, we stopped using that program and went on a search for a new one.

I found one that I like. It teaches all of the phonetic sounds, uses Explode the Code, and even has fun manipulatives that I'm sure E5 will love. Now, we just have to wait for it to arrive via UPS.

What do we do while we wait, you ask?

Why, we make a lapbook, of course!


This is an All About Me lapbook from Live and Learn Press. You can download this lapbook there for free!


We are using the lapbook to help remember important information.


We talked about different parts of the body...


...and what you can do with them.


Included is a timeline of his life...


...family member's names...


...vital statistics like weight, height, hair color, etc. ...


...an acrostic poem using his name, and some of his favorite things.


Also, the three most important things E5 thinks you should know about him...

1. I love Jesus.

2. I love people.

3. I want to be in the air force and love Jesus.

Cute, huh?


Here's his self-portrait that we glued to the front. Pin It Now!

A Whale of a Lapbook

G7 is taking a class at co-op using Jeannie Fulbright's Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day. The second chapter of the book discusses whales. We decided to make a lapbook about whales using FREE templates from Homeschool Share. I know...I'm always talking about HSS, but they are an invaluable resource!


This lapbook is pretty small compared to most that we do. I really just wanted him to make a few of the booklets to reinforce what he had learned that week while reading the chapters.


In this petal book, G7 listed how the whales are classified.


When opened, this mini-book tells the different "antics" of whales.


We made these whale cards, with a picture on one side and information about the whale on the back. Then G7 sorted them into "toothed whales" and "baleen" whales.


G7 made a chart to show how long different types of whales were.


Along the same line, we also measured the length of different whales using yarn. We cut the length and labeled each string. The Belunga whale is 15 feet. But the rest of the whales were so large we had to go to the backyard. The longest is the Blue Whale at 80-90 feet. It covered almost the entire width of our backyard...very cool to have this visual.


This is the back of the lapbook. I hole-punched a page protector and the file folder on both sides and attached them using yarn. This way I had a large pouch to keep all of our "whale measurements" in. Pin It Now!