Saturday, March 26, 2011

Earthquake lapbook

In my previous post I mentioned that with all the media coverage of the Japan earthquake, we would start a unit study of them.  We opted to make a lapbook with our study.  Indy really enjoys making lapbooks and I do too, I just forget about them.  Homeschoolshare.com  has loads of FREE lapbook components and information on a wealth of subjects (we started on their HUGE volcano unit week).  All of the parts of this lapbook came from them.

Cover:


Inside:



We didn't have enough room in the basic folder for all the components, so I added another sheet of heavy card stock to make a flap that opens and give him more room to put things.   Here it is open:





Area under the flap.  We made booklets with info on the Haiti and Japan earthquakes:






Close up of one of the components (notice the neat handwriting!):


Indy really enjoyed learning about the earthquakes and has been riveted to the news to get the latest information on what's going on in Japan.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Natural Disasters and Science

Ugh, poor Japan.  I don't know what else to say.  Every day it seems to get worse and worse.  Indy has been glued to the NEWS watching what's going on over there and started asking questions about the earthquake and tsunamis and all that they encompass.  We've been really slacking in science, so I got the bright idea to study earthquakes and volcanoes.  Is that wrong? 
We started working on an earthquake lapbook (it also includes tsunamis) this week (FREE from homeschoolshare.com!) and when it is completed, we we will move on to the volcano lapbook (also FREE!).  Some part of me feels kind of weird to use a horrible event like this to kick start our sadly lacking science, but I figured we're getting loads of information on it via the news and Indy seems really interested in learning about it, so why not?