Gearing Up for School with Lapbooks ::: a Review

It is hard to believe that two weeks from today we will start our 4th year of homeschooling … I still feel like such a novice at this! We are planning on starting the first full week of August, and then we will add in Classical Conversations at the end of the month. Gives us a few weeks to get our feet wet with home and new fall routines before adding in our outside classes!

This year, I’m hoping to do a much better job of working with the girls on our CC memory work. Last year – to be true – we were flying by the seat of our pants as first year CC-ers and tutor. We never got into a great routine of reviewing the material other than in the car, and then, it would be just certain subjects like the timeline song over and over and over again. And review? We were doing good just to KEEP UP.

That’s why, when Karen Gill from Wisdom and Righteousness offered to send me the complete set of her Cycle 2 Lapbooks in exchange for a review I jumped at the chance! These are set up so that you can do them in the traditional file folder format or in a binder. We are going to go with a three prong folder for our books and then review them in six week increments. If needed, then I can also move pages around so that they are grouped by subject if there is a particular area someone needs practice in.

Please note these are not a substitution for the Foundations book that you purchase as part of CC – in fact, without it, you will be hard pressed to complete the lapbooks because there are a lot of blanks to fill in.

Her lapbook elements are very well done. Almost a little on the complicated side in my opinion, coming from someone who has mostly done the free lapbooks from Homeschool Share. However, she gives very details instruction on how to assemble the parts which I appreciated and gives recommendations of what type of paper she suggests for different parts. I ended up just making mine with regular copy paper and will have some gluing to do to assemble some of the parts back to back.

For my up and coming fourth grader, who I am highly suggesting work towards memory master this coming year (mastery/memorization of all seven CC subjects), I think she will be able to take this resource and fly with it. I’ll probably need to give a little guidance on the assembly of some of the parts, but overall, I think she can manage most of it independently. For my rising second grader, I think she will need more help assembling her lapbook and even cutting out some of the more complicated pieces. (However, cutting out the parts is one of the things I mind the least – put on a movie in the evening and sit down with my scissors and I can get it knocked out in no time flat). : ) As for my third student, I will mostly likely NOT use this lapbook with B. While she is moving on to 1st grade this year, she is not reading or writing well enough to put together one of these lapbooks (I can give more details on this if asked), so she I will continue to do all of her memory work orally – with lots of signing, singing, and movement!

Thank you so much to Karen for shooting a copy of these lapbooks my way! They are going to be a GREAT resource for my older girls this coming year and I’m looking forward on working with them to put these together.

I received a copy of the complete Cycle 2 memory lapbooks for the purpose of this review – no other compensation was given. These are my honest thoughts on these lapbooks and am happy to answer any further questions on them if there is something you are interested in knowing about.