Christmas Lapbook

Darn all these Christmas things that I didn’t get posted in time to actually make them relevant!

Have I mentioned that my Christmas cards haven’t gone out yet? Or that I found my cards from last year (while looking for stamps for this year) still nestled in a drawer? Darn, darn, darn.

In any case, I wanted to share a really fun pastime of the kids….lapbooking. Until last month, I didn’t have a clue there was anything like this out there…even though I had bought this Easy File Folder Reports book from Evan Moor about 2 years ago. It covers topics in Science, Social Studies, History, and Celebrations and puts it all in an easy and fun ‘file folder’ type report. While on my search for stamps I found it (in a different drawer than where my last year’s cards were) and pulled it out to look it over again. Before I could, the Naturalist picked it up and decided to do the Christmas Celebration report.

And here is her finished lapbook (pay no mind to my unmended sweater…Julie, where are you when I need you?!):

Open it to find mini books on different topics she looked up.

Here are our family traditions:
“Our advent calendar is a box with more boxes inside and you pull them out for candy. Christmas tree hide and go seek is when you put an animal on the tree and the other person finds it. We decorate with ornaments and fake snow. We like to eat scones. They are fluffy and delicious fried bread with honey and Jelly. YUMMY!”

Then there are some symbols of Christmas:
“Wreath is a symbol of the never ending eternal value of love, having no end. A candy cane represents the shape of the shepherd’s crook, used to bring lost lambs back to the fold. The gift bow is tied, as we should all be tied together in bonds of goodwill forever. A candle is a mirror of starlight, reflecting our thanks for the star of Bethlehem.

(She researched all this using google, and I was hoping–since she really doesn’t like writing!–that she’d get some practice by copying it all down in the minibook–she foiled my plans by printing the information out and pasting it inside. Smart girl.)

Finally she chose to spotlight some traditions in a different country. She chose Germany:
“German people have advent candles on a wreath. Decorating Christmas trees started in Germany. They bake spicy cookies called lebkuchen.”

And there you have it…a pretty basic lapbook! She chose not to do some minibooks, and alter some to her own liking, which is the beautiful thing about these file folder reports. Since this, she and the Golfer continue to work on different ones every day. They have gotten bigger and fancier (pop up books! extra pages! maps! flip books!) the more they work on them. I’ve joined up with the lapbooking webring and added a lapbook category since they are so much fun to share.
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