Our 1st attempt at Lapbooking

Well, we had our first ,and I thought last, attempt at lapbooking recently. Following in my good friend Jene's footsteps I thought I'd get my little guy lapbooking. If you don't know what lapbooking is, open your mind for a cool learning tool, kinda scrapbooky in nature. Type it in to google, or even YOUTUBE and you'll soon find out it's a neat way to present all the thing's you've been learning about!  LapBookLessons
is a neat website.

As you can see at jene's blog, she lapbooks EVERYTHING! And they are SOO cool!

So, for our first try, we did Elias' current love  or one of them anyway  (not Hannah Montana or High School Musical)  Spiderman!  So, for a week or so he would search on Google Images for cool pics of Spidey, Mary Jane, Peter Parker and even spiders and webs.  He also verbally told me the story of how Peter Parker became Spiderman, and then how Venom came into play. I typed it all out.

He had a lot of fun, and he was very proud of his story!

Then came the assembly. Now, if you are into lapbooking you KNOW this is where your creative genius can come out!  For cool examples, there are sites online and also Dinah Zike's Big Book of Books...But Elias didn't want to make cute little books inside of the big lapbook, he didn't want to make neat accordian folds, he didnt want to have flaps, he just wanted to glue his Spidey's all over the front and be done. UGHHH. It was slightly frustrating for me. 

So...like a good little unschooler I put the project away for a day when he was more into it.  Except that day didnt really come. I put the rest of it together and thought, well, that's the end of that!

A few months later I was lamenting this to Jene during a conversation about one of her kids stellar lapbooks and she let me in on a little "secret".  She mostly puts the lapbooks together!!!!!!!  Her kids do the research, and color the pictures and find the cool pictures and write the poems and whatever else is going into it, and then SHE assembles it!!!  This way, THEY are learning, SHE gets to "scrapbook" and everyone LOVES the end product!!!

Well, hello!! Why didn't I think of that! For some reason I thought the whole thing was a failure because he didn't do all of it, but he did the important stuff, the LEARNING!! And, he was PROUD of the end product because he had a part in it! 

As I was recanting this story to Jene, Elias was in the background going, "I loved the lapbook Mommy"....really?!?!  All I remember is , "grrrr why doesnt he like this cool flap, why can't he glue that picture here, not there", etc etc  Geesh!  I'm so caught up in the thought process that if they don't want to do it or it isn't cool to them, then we move on, that I lost sight of,  part of it WAS cool to him, just not the creative part! All was not lost! We can lapbook more!!

Thanks Jene, for helping me put it into perspective!