Weekly Wrap Up 26: Lap Books & Preschool Activity Bags

There was some gorgeous weather the middle of this week! Temperatures reached 17C on Wednesday! :) I wrangled up all the kids and took them to the park with a bunch of other homeschooled kiddos. It was very windy but that didn't appear to bother my kids much as they were all over the park, enjoying the nice temperatures. We have missed summer: park days, swimming, biking, running, out door activities - everything summer. By all accounts it promises to be a warm spring and lovely summer. Wednesday was proof that nicer weather is on its way.


Science this week!
We have been working on the last half of our Apologia Astronomy Text with the lap books by

Exploring Creation with Astronomy Lessons 7-14 Lapbook by Knowledge Box Central Series

For the first 13 lessons we printed off the free Course Notebook pages Apologia offers. These pages were more then sufficient for our purposes! We had fun with the notebooks but also felt like we needed to switch things up a bit, thus the reason for the lap books! The lap books will take us to the end of the course material before we head off in to another unity study in science. They are proving to be a welcome change and addition to what we are doing with the last half of our school year for Science.

Below is both the children's lap books, we keep them in a single plastic file folder so they don't get damaged. (Yay! for Dollar Store items)


We begin our lesson by reading through the Astronomy Text and then finishing up with a section of the lapbook work. It usually involves some sketching and then the printing out of some of the information about the topic we just read. The lap book contains many colourful illustrations strategically placed out on file folders which have been folded into the middle. Once completed there will be four file folders stapled together to conclude their project on Astronomy! Below shows a closer view of number one of the four. :)


In the picture below Heather is sketching out the orbit of the comet, earth and the sun. Then she wrote information about how the comet's orbit works and how long it takes comets to orbit our sun (ie: Short and Long Period Comets). The kids were especially thrilled to find out that there is a meteor shower every year between August 9th and August 13th; we have our calendars marked for that date!

Preschool Activity Bags!
I have a little one that doesn't always want to do what the other two do, though she sits in on most everything! For my 5 year old I have a variety of teaching tools. The two pictures below feature 2 of the 25 activity bags that were created to be apart of her curriculum. About a year ago I ran a Preschool Activity Bag Swap, in which 20 ladies participated. We each made 20 of one activity and then got together to swap our activities, giving us a grand total of 20 bags to use as teaching tools at home! The activities are not only learning tools but they are engaging and fun, designed to hold a child's interest. I organized the swap and I would highly recommend it to anyone who would like various activities to do at home with their preschoolers. If you are interested in doing something like this, see Activities in a Bag for all the details and various books available for doing your own activity bags or for doing an activity bag swap! The books were inexpensive and well worth every moment spent to create them! The swap included 20 people and I made 5 more bags on my own to complete my curriculum. My daughter really enjoys these bags and will often get the activities out on her own outside of 'school'. I have also received lots of good feedback from the parents who participated in the swap. They and their children enjoyed the swap and activities.

The pictures below are example of 2 of the activities. The first one helps the child learn their alphabet. They match the letters with the master sheet, and then turn the cards over to reveal a two piece puzzle that depicts the sound of the letter they just matched. (ps: that is not a real mouse in the picture! lol)




The activity is a number match game. I say the number and she picks it out and matches it to the right one.




This post is linked back to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap Up! Please feel free to join in the fun and post your own Weekly Wrap Up via the linky under her Weekly Wrap Up post! I love reading what others are doing, lots of wonderful ideas out there! :)