Little Bits of Life: A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks Review

We are doing Lapbooks again! This time we are excited to be using A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks. We are using a set from their Apologia Curriculum page. Specifically we are using the Apologia Exploring Creation with Astronomy (2nd Edition) Lapbook. This Lapbook set is designed for grades 2-7 I am using it with a 3rd grader and a 5th grader. It includes something for each lesson that is in the Apologia Exploring Creation with Astronomy (2nd Edition) book. It also includes instruction on assembly, and placement of mini books, lesson plans and answer keys. This is a downloadable product and contains 158 printable pages.

This is what my girls call a mega big Lapbook. It used 14 file folders that you will install in a binder. They included some directions and pictures on how to do this and I am thankful for the photos because I would have messed it up with out them. This hole process includes lots of folding and taping and it took me way longer than it probably should have to create two of them. I had issues with my 3 hole punch. I am going to recommend not using one. The tape gets stuck in the punch and tears out the holes when you try to remove it. At least that is what happened with ours. A single hole punch was much easier although it was more time consuming to do and still got stuck at times. We live in a small town and the only duct tape I could get a hold of was plain silver but you could get fancy and do some of the colored duct tape or something with a print on it. Stars would be cool if you could find it or may be glitter. I thought blue with glitter would kind of go with the hole Astronomy theme. All in all assembling the file folders was probably the most time consuming thing for me.

I was pleased with this lapbook. We have not completed the entire thing yet but we are well into it. Like I said above each lesson has a mini book that your child will complete to go along with the lesson they learned in the text book. I found these to be a great edition to the student notebooking journal that came with their Apologia set. Some of the mini books repeated the information that they did in the notebook, but we did find a good number of them that gave them additional information that was covered in the text but not the notebook. Review is always good so we were ok repeating some of it. I can actually say that I think the Lapbook would be good substitute for the student notebook if you had a child that preferred doing the lapbooks.

The girls found the lapbook assignments easy to do and understand. I do think a 7th grader might be a little bored with it though. A good number of the pictures were offered in color. This was an issue for us as we only have a black and white printer. The girls did try to color some of the pictures to make them a little more interesting. You can see some of the pieces we have been working on before we put them in the file folder. All in all this Lapbook is a nice edition to the Apologia Astronomy set.