We have enjoyed doing several unit studies this year, including one on the Titanic, a farm unit, and an apple unit. With our spring weather unit I wanted to try something new that would allow the kids to show off what they learned.
They each had fun creating their own personalized Weather Lapbook.
Most of the directions I’ve read on lapbooking use a file folder (or several) to create the lapbook. Since I like to use what we have on hand, I cut portions from some poster board we had purchased earlier this year.
I folded each lapbook into thirds to create different pages.
Together we decided what information would go in the lapbooks.
We had talked about how the sun can affect the weather, so the kids cut out large, yellow circles and sun rays from construction paper. To make it easier for my 5 and 7 year-olds, I typed up the 3 main ways the sun can affect the weather. This was glued under the yellow sunshine flap.
A simple tri-folded piece of construction paper created a little booklet to share the four types of precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, and hail).
I had each of them write about their favorite thing they learned during our weather unit. This went on the right hand portion of the lapbook. (You can see it in the very first picture.)
In the center section they put the cloud booklet they had each made.
For this I typed up a description of each of the three main types of clouds (cumulus, cirrus, and stratus). Then they labeled each page, glued on the description, and created the clouds with cotton balls.
During our weather unit we kept track of the weather with a simple daily weather chart.
They loved watching their homemade wind anemometer spin! We also used several other tools to check the weather each day. For this portion of the lapbook I found simple images for each tool and had them match the tool with the correct job.
When we finished adding information to the lapbook, they had lots of fun decorating them and sharing them with family members.
