Katy and the Big Snow

Last week A17 and I started our study of Katy and the Big Snow. This is one of the titles in the Five in a Row curriculum. We have been using FIAR loosely since last spring ( more on FIAR in another post!). The book has been a favorite of A17. I chose several lessons from the teacher's manual and adapted them a bit to fit. A17 colored a picture of Katy and used that to make the basis of his lapbook.

One of the lessons involved reading maps. We changed this a bit. A17 colored pictures of town buildings from the story and we glued them on poster board. I found these by googling Katy and the Snow printables. We worked on the words "above" and "below" instead of more typical directions. For example, the library is below the railroad tracks.

Another lesson had to do with identifying street signs. We read a wonderful DK book called Signs in Our World. Then we made a tab book about signs. We left a spot in the lapbook blank to add a photo of his poster map.

We first started with FIAR because of all the science lessons. This time it was about weather patterns and snow. We did several simple experiments. One involved putting salt or sand on ice cubes then seeing which one melted the fastest. If forgot to take a before picture, so in this one the ice cube is all but melted.

Columbus Lapbook

A17 and I read the picture book In 1492 by Jean Marzollo today and put together this lapbook on Columbus. I found some printables at Enchanted Learning and ABC Teach.

We used Boardmaker pictures to write a sentence about Columbus and highlight the dates. I did the cutting and A17 helped with coloring and gluing.

We also did a simple experiment with a ship, water and wind. The ship is made from a plastic lid, playdoh, a toothpick and a square of paper. We set it in a tub of water and blew on it to see how fast it went and where it would end up. A17 really loves any kind of experiment!

HSS: Lots of new materials!

Homeschool Share recently completed it's annual Blast contest and has posted lots of new materials on the website. They have new units, lapbooks and things for workboxes under a new category called Workboxables. Some of the new items Ds and I are looking forward to using are the units and lapbooks for How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA and Christmas Around the World.

There are also new units and lapbooks on Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, a Spanish lapbook, lapbooks on bears and beavers, Goodnight Gorilla lapbook and a unit on the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic Farmer Boy in addition to many other fabulous parent created materials.

Ocean Unit

A17's Ocean unit this spring ended up so large that instead of using a file folder lapbook, we put everything into a Bare Book. Bare Books can be purchased in a variety of sizes and are great for big projects or something that is ongoing like our Flat Stanley project. This ocean book contains resources from Homeschoolshare, project packs Under the Sea and Clownfish Adventure from Hands of a Child, activities from Evan Moor, Enchanted Learning and other online sites. These first pages also include booklets listing the books we read, for example DK Eye Wonder Ocean.

At the end of the book is a separate book containing all the coloring pages of various ocean animals. Most of these were taken from the Color and Learn series book entitled Ocean Life.


A17 chose to focus his report on what he called a "shamu" whale or orca. On the left page is a fact sheet containing things he wanted to remember from the books we read. On the right are photo cards and one fact of different types of whales. Last is a whale pop up book featured in a previous post

A17 chose which ocean animals to read about including dolphins, sea turtles, jellyfish, star fish and sea dragons.

Underneath the minit books for dolphin pod and echolocation, A17 put Boardmaker pictures for the definitions. For mammals in the ocean he used dolphin and whale.

This page uses Boardmaker pictures to describe why ocean are important and has some glitter fish.To go along with the Clownfish Adventure lapbook, we watched the Nemo movie and read a book called Just Keep Swimming. These pages include minit books about clownfish and manta rays, and information on characters on the Nemo movie including the Tank Gang and Bruce the great white shark!

We made several more pop up books based on the whale pattern. This one is called My Book About Dory.We included photos of some of the art projects that A17 enjoyed. You can find these posts here.

The last couple of pages are pocket pages that contain several books on ocean animals we found on Enchanted Learning and in our Evan Moor books.

Pirate Lapbook

For a pirates lapbook we read a Magic Tree House chapter book , Pirates Past Noon by Mary Pope Osborne. Many of the Magic Tree House books have research guides which go along with them--in this case we read Pirates. These guides are packed with lots of neat info and drawings and A17 really enjoys them. Another great book was DK Eye Wonder: Pirate.

The lapbook components came from several sources including Homeschoolshare and Hands of a Child. I purchased the lapbook Ahoy Matey! from HOAC. The Magic Tree House items were found on the Random House website which has teacher guides for some of their books.

The left side of the lapbook contained a minit book on some key vocab from Pirates Past Noon, a list of the books we read, a tabbed minit book on pirates, a minit book on parrots and minit book of A17's favorite pirate jokes.

The right side has an eye spy minit book, a Magic Tree House Passport, a book on words with the letter P , and minit books on island and compass. The MTH Passport includes 4 pages which are used to summarize the book. For compass you might want to try an experiment making your own with a cork, needle and a pan of water. There are several variations of this online.

Boardmaker

Since I have mentioned Boardmaker on several other posts I wanted to elaborate on it a bit. Boardmaker is software that is used by people with disabilities to communicate, for visual schedules, and to assist with learning.

Boardmaker software from Mayer-Johnson can be used in several ways. You can print out picture cards with it to use for communication. We have used these picture cards in A17's lapbooks too. It can also be used with Boardmaker add-ons to make books, all types of schedules, worksheets, etc. Boardmaker pictures can be used to make interactive books and games. These pictures are often used in PECS ( Picture Exchange Communication System ) too.

Boardmaker offers other software such as Boardmaker Plus and Boardmaker Speaking Dynamically Pro. These are used on the computer for intereactive learning games or on speech devices such as Dynavox.