A couple years ago we discovered the fun of lapbooking. Having completed a couple lapbooks on our own, I was excited to get to review a few lapbooks from A Journey Through Learning.
The lapbooks are created in three seperate sections which get glued together for the final product.
They have many lapbooks available covering a variety of academic subjects and very reasonably priced. And, you don’t have to wait for them to ship in the mail as they are available for immediate download. With so many great topics to choose from we decided to use The Parables of Jesus for our Bible time for about a month.
What we loved . . .
Everything you need to know is right there. We have lapbooked before, but I lack any strong creative genes, so I struggled to lead my kids well in putting together creative lapbooks. We always found ourselves using the same templates. They came out looking a bit dry. Still fun, still capturing the knowledge, but not the works of art I had imagined filing away. With A Journey Through Learning’s lapbooks we each created our own lapbook that packed in the information while retaining our individual flavor in the process.
The ebook is easy to work with, print out the pages you need (however many copies you need), and then read through one section (or more) each day.
Kept our Bible time very hands on and interactive.
Got the kids excited about parables. Day two, both my older girls came with passages of Scripture they wanted to read with parables they had found on their own. Gotta love that!
Incredibly easy to use. They tell you where to cut, glue, staple, etc. They include a picture of the finished product as well as a placement diagram with each section to remind you where every piece belongs.
What we tweaked . . .
Not much. I did work more closely with my younger kids to help them write in the results of our discussions, but other than that, even my five year old had a fairly easy time participating.
We often got carried away in our discussions of the parables. I love that the authors encourage you to focus on the main point, and we did. We examined our lives and our home in light of what Jesus taught in each parable. I especially treasured our talk on storing up treasure in heaven, and what that really looks like. The month flew quickly by.
You could print the whole book if you prefer to read from paper. However, I found it easy enough to print what they needed to cut out for the day and then read the lessons from the computer screen while they began cutting.
They really know their parables now.
I would definitely recommend these lapbooks to someone wanting to try out a lapbook. I have heard from some experienced lapbookers that they don’t like being “locked in” to their template and format, so if you really enjoy putting together all your own material this might not be your thing. Or, it might be a great starting point for something a bit different than you would have done without the materials.
We will likely be checking out some of their other lapbooks as well. Most of them run $13 for the download, $14 for a CD of the material, or $21 to order a printed copy. They also have minilapbooks, copywork, and other materials available on their website.
Check out more reviews at the TOS Crew’s blog.
