Our First Lapbook: “Joan of Arc”

We are on our first year with Classical Conversations. It sure has been quite an adaptation, but we are learning a lot and I like the method (I will be writing on this later). We just concluded the first half of the year with Week 12.

For Estefania’s last presentation, we had to pick a character from our timeline. She chose Joan of Arc. It occurred  to me that it would help her present using a lapbook as a visual aid. I’ve been looking into the lap booking method in websites and in other bloggers’ pages and it seemed interesting and fun for kids to do, and easy enough to assemble. I’ve been wanting to create one to see how my daughter would like it, and the response was great. So here it goes, the making of our first lapbook:

I dash-wrote all the information for her so that she could practice writing while tracing.

Once finished, the lapbook had a flap that could be flipped up and showed a map of where the Hundred Years War took place (above picture) and when closed, it showed a picture of Joan of Arc, which Estefania colored during week 5 (below).

I printed the titled flaps from the book “Simple Days Unit Studies Field Trip Lapbook” (The Simple Homeschool) that I got for free through Currclick.

During week 5, her favorite activity was making a Joan of Arc paper doll. She colored it and I helped her cut it. She had fun playing with it as I read Joan’s story to her. We decided to store the paper doll in a pocket I made in the back of the lapbook, and she showed it at the end of her presentation.

This was a simple lapbook, but it helped her stayed focus while presenting, and it also helped her reinforce the information she had previously learned. She asked me to do one about Catherine The Great (week 10) too, since we also did a paper doll of her. This was a success, so, It seems we will be doing more of these lapbooks pretty soon : ).