Mic has started Grade 4 now (our fourth year of homeschooling!!!), and our first Social Studies chapter is all about the Ancient Mesopotamians.  I’ve seen “Lapbooks” being used on many other homeschool blogs.

A lapbook is an inexpensive portfolio or collection of mini-books, flaps, and folded display material, that provides interactive space for drawings, stories, graphs, graphics, timelines, diagrams, and written work, from any topic, unit study, book you choose, gathered, glued, and creatively displayed in a coloured standard sized cardboard folder, often folded in a “shutter-fold”, that fits in your lap.

So we decided to give this Lapbooking thing a go, and it has been such a great project.  Mic is a typical visual learner and this seems to be right up his alley.  Here is his very first Lapbook:

He has learnt about farming in the Fertile Crescent.  King Nebuchadnezzar and the legend of The Hanging Gardens of Babylon he built for his Persian wife.

Temples that were built and called Ziggurats.

How Scribes had to study for 12 years to learn the 600 different symbols that made up the first form of writing called Cuneiform.  He LOVED writing his own secret message in Cuneiform.

He was fascinated to learn about all the inventions we still use today that originated from the Mesopotamian Inventors.

We also added a little pocket with a few index cards for “Fun Facts”.  We’re not done with the chapter yet and I’m sure we will be adding to his lapbook as we go along, but this has definitely sparked an interest for him and he is very proud of it.  So I guess we will be making many many more lapbooks this year as we go along.  Yay for fun learning at home!

Much love,

Mandi xxx