"F" is for Ferdinand Lapbook

Bode enjoyed reading The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf for the letter F. Being that Bode is typically like the other bulls in the story, being a rough and tumble kind of boy with his two big brothers, it was nice for him to read the gentler side of life.

Lapbook Activity Resources:

Homeschool Share: The Story of Ferdinand lapbook templates

Homeschool Creations: Cut and paste, Do-a-dot

Enchanted Learning: Circle the F words, I can color F words

Beginning Reading: Circle F and f

Confessions of a Homeschooler: Handwriting Worksheet, F patterns

I forgot to take pictures of Bode while we worked on the lapbook, but here's the finished product.

 

Finished Lapbook:

 

"E" is for Elephant & Egg

This week, Bode and I read Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. It is a very cute book that teaches about Horton's positive character traits like faithfulness, diligence, perseverance, gentleness, and kindness. In the end, Horton was rewarded for his faithfulness, which was very encouraging. We spent three days working on these lapbook activities. Bode did a variety of things, including printing practice, coloring, patterning, paint dots, cutting and pasting, sequencing, matching, and learning. I must say that doing the little bit of cutting each week has definitely improved his cutting. Every little bit counts.

Lapbook Resources:
Homeschool Creations: Cut and paste, Upper and lower case tracing cards, Do-a-dot
Enchanted Learning: Circle 10 words, I can color, Matching words
Homeschool Share: Horton Hatches the Egg lapbook pages
Homeschool Share: Egg lapbook pages

Bode at work:

Finished Lapbook:

"D" is for Duckling

Last week, Bode and I read Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey for our preschool time. Bode loved the book and the ducklings. We spent three days working on the activities because our other days were busy. But these activities could have easily been spread over four to five days.

Lapbook Resources:
Enchanted Learning: Circle 10 words, Matching words, I can color
Homeschool Creations: Cut and paste, Upper and lower case tracing, "D" is for duck
Homeschool Share: Words that begin with "D"
Beginning Reading: Circle the "D"s
Kiz Club: Duck lifecycle
Homeschool Share: Duckling lapbook pages

Bode during his activities:

Finished Product:

"C" is for Carrot

This week Bode and I read The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss and learned about the letter "C". We spent four days on it - reading the book each day and doing a few activities each day. Each day we probably spent about 20 minutes (more or less) reading and on these lapbook pages, which was perfect for Bode. Bode also planted cantaloupe seeds (we didn't have any carrot seeds), watering and checking the seeds each day (no growth yet).

The resources I used are from:

Homeschool Share - Carrot seed lapbook pages
Homeschool Creations - Tracing cards and Cut & Paste sheet
Enchanted Learning - Picture page, word match, and coloring page

Here's Bode, hard at work:

And the Finished Product:

"A" is for Abbey

I like the idea of "rowing" a book with my preschooler. I also like the idea of studying a letter a week. So I've decided to combine the two into one lapbook - rowing a book and studying a letter a week. The concept of "rowing" is from Five in Row. You read a book five days in a row with your child(ren) and do an activity each day. For preschool, the reading and activities are shorter and don't require all five days.

Now the book I chose to start with is not part of their book list, but we haven't gathered all the books and I wanted to get started right away. I chose a book that we already had and created my own activities for it, but I will also be doing the books from Before Five in a Row.

Our "A" book selection this week was:

Day 1:

I read the book aloud to Bode. The pictures are lovely. The book was short enough to keep his attention, yet the characters had enough varied activity to keep it interesting. The activities Bode did were coloring the character cutouts that I cut out ahead of time (which I found online by searching through Google pictures). Other than a little help with the cat's eyes, Bode did the rest. (We later added sticks to make them into puppets.) Bode also did an alphabet page for the letter "A" (worksheet from Enchanted Learning.)

Day 2:

We read the book together. Since we were short on time, I only had Bode do one activity. In the book the characters have sweet dreams, so I had Bode dictate to me his favorite dream(s). He likes dreams about having fun and stopping volcanoes. That's a boy for you :)

Day 3:

We read the book together again. Bode likes going over the characters' names, and today he remembered the frog's name is Euripides (which I thought was pretty impressive). We talked about the instruments they used in the book and Bode started tracing the names (violin, tamborine, trumpet, drum). He made rainbow upper and lower case "Aa"s by tracing them with different colors, to practice his penmanship. He cut and pasted pictures of objects that start with an "A" (worksheet from Homeschool Creations.) He also colored a picture of a tea cup to celebrate tea time.

Day 4:

We read the book again, of course. Bode finished tracing the musical instrument names and wrote "music." Bode dictated a "knock knock" joke to me. He completed a word match page of letter "A" words (worksheet from Enchanted Learning.) Then he traced and wrote on his own, upper case and lower case letter "A" (worksheets from Homeschool Creations.) After I put it together we reviewed the lapbook. Bode kept saying "Wow" so I guess he liked it and liked seeing all the work he did.

Finished Product:

This was the first lapbook I've done with Bode, so I kept finding myself at the computer seeing if there was anything else I wanted to add for him to do for it. But it was fun and kept his attention. He loved the book and never got tired of reading it. Somedays he liked writing more than others, but because we only worked on it for short periods of time, it wasn't that big of a deal. I decided to separate the book activites from the letter activites in the lapbook. This lapbook will be fun for us to review throughout the year.

I've also linked up to Preschool Corner. If you're looking for more preschool ideas, just follow the link: