Bees Minibook

This minibook was made by a friend of mine. In this project the art and craft is just as important as the bee information.

The project is inside a hive shaped book, which is several centimetres thick.

When opened up you can see that the project is based on the hexagon shapes of the honeycomb. At the top there is a folded diagram of a bee, two cut out felt bees and a hexagon mini book that folds out and out, as I will show in another picture below.

On the bottom section a series of hexagon boxes has been assembled, with accordian style mini books of information stuck inside some, and in others there is a simple lid, with information stuck down underneath. The hexagon boxes were made by folding strips of card into shape, then taping them in position.

Bee diagram, unfolded. This is in the top left corner of the project book.

Here the series of hexagons starts to unfold. Each hexagon is covered with either a flat or a folded paper containing bee facts. The hexagons are taped together, so that they can be folded out one at a time.

Fully unfolded.

The picture above shows the hexagon boxes fully opened up. All contain bee facts.

Any bee facts can be included in this project. The following links may be useful:

 

http://42explore.com/bees.htm

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/honeybee.html

www.honey.com/consumers/kids/beefacts.asp

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Knowing Allah Lapbook

For this lapbook with my ten year olds I thought that I would try something different. I wanted to see if a lapbook could be combined with a textbook study. Notes or answers from a book study could easily be jotted in an exercise book, but would they ever be referred to again? So, I decided to try making notes into a lapbook! This is similar to the Hands of a Child lapbook approach where the information for completing activities is contained in the study guide. For this lapbook the study guide was this book:

This is what we did with it:

My sons are not that interested in decoration and presentation, so we used different colours of card to make the lapbook look more interesting. We used templates and simple flip flap style books and layer books.

Basically we studied the book, chapter by chapter and after each section we would make a lapbook mini book highlighting the key information. The sections were:

Some of the names of Allah

Some of Allah’s qualities

Qualities with bodily names

Understanding Allah’s qualities

Seeing Allah, the difference between this life and the next

Summary of the Pillars of Emaan

Where is Allah?

This is a simple greetings card fold, with lots of small ones inside with the names written on them. We chose a selection of the names listed in the book.

For each section the boys simply copied out key information from the textbook. I made use of the lapbook templates from Homeschool Share.

For a flip flap book, such as above we would write a statement on one side of the card and the evidence from the Quran or hadith on the other side.

I will not describe the details of each minibook because in order to get the details correct on this type of topic reference needs to be made to Al-Jibaly’s text, or another similar book. This style of lapbook could easily be applied to any textbook study, and could be a way of making textbook study more interesting.

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Reflection Lapbook

I did a practical project on reflection with my daughters, and gathered together whatever could be done on paper into a lapbook. The following pictures are from my 6 year old’s lapbook.

The hama bead butterfly sticks down easily using ordinary PVA glue.

These are the activities I could include in the lapbook:

worksheets from Enchanted Learning on completing a symmetrical drawing, and identifying symmetrical flags, another sheet on completing shapes

colouring a butterfly

making a hama bead butterfly

cutting out shapes from folded squares of paper and marking the “mirror line”

making fold over reflection paintings

These are activities we also did as part of the project but which could not be included in the lapbook:

Using a mirror to examine pictures and things to see how reflection works

Building models from bricks to create balanced and unbalanced shapes.

Using a pegboard to make reflections. (Put an elastic band around the middle of the board, make a design on one side, then reflect it on the other.)

“These shapes have a mirror line”. We drew a line down the fold to make it stand out.

To arrange the paintings I stuck the one underneath completely to the folder. The others I layered over each other, only sticking them by a strip at the top.

Two of the worksheets I folded and stuck inside the lapbook, the third one I just stuck on the back cover.

This is a really easy and relaxing lapbook to try!

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