An Election Lapbook! Our First!

Lapbooks have overwhelmed, yet fascinated, me for a long, long time. I wanted to take the plunge into this style of learning but feared they would be too all-consuming and I wouldn't have the gumption to see the project through. My friend Christina Brown helped a lot by coming to our last homeschool moms' group meeting and bringing samples of her children's lapbooks-- showing us how doable and simple they can be. Also, joining the Homeschool Share email loop has helped me, plus learning about CurrClick. Homeschool Share has tons of links to free lapbooks that are already done for you-- you just cut and fold per the directions they include. When I found out they had one of these for elections, I knew it was time to take the plunge. And so, behold-- our very first (but definitely not the last!) lapbook. I am possibly more proud of it than my daughter.

We used two folders because we ended up needing extra space for all the great stuff we found. I bought colored folders at Big Lots for $2/package of ten. For this one, we used a red and a blue. We also used red, white and blue cardstock to make foldout pages. Above, you see two little booklets that were included in the Homeschool Share file. One covers vocabulary words like "poll" and "ballot" and other words kids are likely to be hearing. The other one has blanks for your child to figure out which election they get to vote in. We still need to finish the "Could I Be President" page-- I had to wait for the book to come in from the library. We will finish that tonight or tomorrow. (We got this page from the downloadable file from the D is for Democracy book I wrote about in my election unit post.)

This photo shows two short biographies we printed off of both McCain and Obama. You can see that the Obama page is folded down to reveal a worksheet about the electoral college that we also printed off the computer.

This is the electoral college results map the kids will be keeping track of tomorrow night, coloring in the results as they come in.

I love the little "donkey" and "elephant" matchbook fold books! Underneath, she wrote about the symbols and what they stood for. To the right, you can see a very simple summary we printed off about how a president is elected. To the left under the matchbooks, there is a sample ballot that we filled in for our state election information-- who is running for house and senate, etc. I don't know how much she learned-- but I learned a ton!

If you would like to try your hand at lapbooking, I encourage you to take the plunge-- and don't get stressed about it like I did. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to do once I got started. This video, this video, and this one helped a lot for learning the folds and also how to attach the foldout pieces. And again, I can't say enough for how nice it is to have Homeschool Share resources available for free! Finally, I have to give credit to Tammy Duby from Tobin's Lab, who invented the lapbook concept and has a great video and book on the subject that I also used quite a bit.