They are finally finished . . .

. . . our penguin lapbooks, that is! This is the first time I've ever posted pictures of our lapbooks, so I'm rather excited to say the least.

Now, if you have no idea of what lapbooks are, here's my little explanation: Lapbooks are a way to showcase the things we've learned through studying a particular topic or book. Most of our lapbooks have been topical in nature -- we've done lapbooks on the Olympics, the ocean, Thanksgiving and now penguins.

What makes a lapbook so much fun is that it's filled with little booklets called "minit books" which contain a specific bit of information. This makes a lapbook not just a great tool for presenting material learned, but a wonderful opportunity for review -- Lael and Jaden love to take out lapbooks they've made and read them over again or share them with anyone who will take the time to listen!

This lapbook began with reading Mr. Popper's Penguins as well as many other penguin books. This was the first lapbook that Jaden was really excited to put together; he's already asked that our next lapbook be about polar bears and other Arctic animals, so I guess we'll stay in the cold regions of the world for a bit longer.

So here we are: these are the covers of the lapbooks.

Lael's is on the left and Jaden's is on the right.

This is the inside of Jaden's lapbook -- it includes some penguin poems, pictures of 6 different penguins, as well as penguin puppets!

The inside of Lael's lapbook is a bit different as she is older and can do more research and writing.

The back of Lael's lapbook has her research on 6 particular penguins -- she included 3 interesting facts about each one.

The back of Jaden's lapbook has the life cycle of a penguin as well as cards for each of the 17 species of penguins.

So there you have it . . . an introduction to lapbooking by the amazing students of GodSeekers Academy! And stay tuned - there will be more to come!

Ice sculptures (Part 2)

I know you've probably been waiting so long to find out what happened with our ice sculptures . . . so here they are -- the long-awaited pictures!

These are the "building blocks" - all the colored ice that Jaden and I made!

And here are some of our creations . . .

This was the tallest stack we were able to construct (and manage to take a picture of before it toppled over)

And these are Popper's Performing Penguins on their way to their next performance destination by train!

A couple of things we learned from this activity:

• It's hard to stack ice blocks if they haven't frozen flat -- and most of ours didn't freeze flat
• Next time we do this, we need more square and rectangle-shaped blocks for greater ease of building
• Another "next time" lesson -- color the water in larger quantities, not by putting food coloring into the individual containers -- the ice ended up being too darkly colored and ended up staining our hands
• Gingerbread ice people break very easily -- this was devastating to Jaden when both of his ice people lost a limb rather early in the play time
• Mittens or gloves are the proper attire for this particular activity!

While it was a fun activity, it's not one we'll do every day . . . but it definitely added some "color" to our day!

January is Penguin Month!

At least it is at our house! We're all about penguins here as that's the learning unit we are focusing on.

Our unit is based on the book Mr. Popper's Penguins, a book I remember fondly from my childhood. We will incorporate lots of go-along books, both fiction and non-fiction, as we explore a variety of topics related to penguins, including:

• the lifecycle of a penguin
• where in the world penguins live -- did you know they can be found on 4 of the 7 continents?

• the different species of penguins -- there are 17


• what penguins eat (and what animals eat penguins)

We've already done quite a bit of geography and map work -- reviewing the continents and oceans, learning about the different hemispheres, as well as things like reading map keys and learning about latitude and longitude . . . I don't remember learning this stuff in second grade, never mind preschool! And the best part of all -- they don't realize how much they are learning . . . they're just having fun! (Which is the way learning should be, in my opinion!)