When it comes to curriculum we are as eclectic as they come. Up until this year however, unit studies were my favorite. The only problem I had with unit studies was, for lack of a better word, storage. Storing and organizing the completed works could get tricky. Now, a lot of people may not have to, nor want to, keep completed works. I live in Minnesota though, which doesn’t have high regulations but does have moderate ones. I have two choices. I can either have someone come into my house once a year and look at what we have, are, and will be working on; or, I can send copies of documentation and examples in. Anyway you look at it, I need finished work in case anything is questioned.
You may now be wondering, “What is your new favorite?” I love lapbooks. For those of you who don’t know what a lapbook is, Charisse gave an excellent explanation of it here. In short it is a unit study with all of the activities from the unit study inside several file folders connected together to make a book. This, in and of itself, solved my problem of storing and organizing. Now everything we did for a unit is inside of one book easily stored in a file cabinet. Even all of the hands on things we do for each unit can go in the lapbook in the form of pictures. If there is a craft or something that couldn’t quite fit in the lapbook itself, it can still be slid into the book for storage and be kept together.
Not only does this solve my main problem of storage, it has other advantages as well. With a lapbook, it can be pulled out and played with / reviewed at any point in time. All the puzzles or games from that particular unit can be laminated, and played again and again. If at a later date you want to do more on a subject, you can just add more file folders to the book and continue where you left off. I can not honestly tell you how many unit studies we did on dinosaurs before we started lapbooking. Now, when he wants to work on dinosaurs, we pull out the lapbook. He goes through what is already in the lapbook and we add more if he wants to. You can either do a lapbook like a unit study in that you have all of the subjects (language arts, social studies, history, etc.) in one lapbook, or you can do a lapbook for each subject.
Have you tried lapbooking yet? Do you like them or dislike them? What are the pros and cons you have found with them?