If you’ve spent time on my blog you’ll know that we enjoy lapbooking in our home school and In The Hands of a Child is one place to get your lapbooking supplies from. I was given Kitchen Science which I requested as a way to break up the sameness of our day’s other science with exciting science experiments and mini-books. This lapbook is for grades K through 3rd, and I used it with my 2nd and 4th grade children while my 11 1/2 year old just kind of listened or helped out with the experiments.
If you think unit studies and lapbooking are hard well, think again, because In The Hands of a Child makes it easy and fun for both the child and the parent. This is a 68 page PDF document that is regularly $12.00 but at a special price of $5,00 for right now – and it ‘s fun! Using items that you probably have on hand already, makes it easy to print the mini-books and get started right away in using this in your school. Included is a how to use this guide as well as a lapbook explanation, a 5 day planning guide, related reading, activities (15 in all plus 1 extension activity), instructions, five page research guide and an answer key.
My preferred way of using this guide was to look at the planning guide which includes lessons on oxidation, chemical reaction, kitchen lab versus science lab, among others, and decide how I want to do the lessons. If I try to do everything with my 2nd grader he quickly becomes frustrated, even if I print off the tracing letters mini-books. I divided up what we did and turned this into a 10 day unit, give or take – if they seemed to not be frustrated we’d continue. If you like to tweak things to your students, it’s easy to do or do it as outlined, either way will work perfectly fine.
Don’t mind our dirty science/kitchen lab. Preparing to make our own ‘orange soda’
After deciding how to divide it all up I go to my library’s website and see what books are available from the related reading list, if something isn’t available then I’ll find a easily substituted book. Then I go through the instructions and see if I have all the supplies needed for the experiments, if I don’t have something (like the marshmallows, they are easy and cheap to obtain) I or my husband ran to the store or I asked friends or family if they had something. I printed off the mini-books after that, I allowed my son to use the tracing ones or if there were both tracing and filled in (one has dark black letters already written out while some had letters to trace like connect the dots) – I would let my 4th grader use the written out ones while my 2nd grader used the tracing ones to give him practice writing.
My 11 1/2 year old’s ‘orange soda’ overflowing, yes it’s a measuring cup.
I regret that I didn’t get more pictures, since my oldest and I were busy trying to get things ready and prepped – it was hard to prep and take pictures. However we have a great keepsake that is in their lap notes (spiral bounded blank scrapbooks we use in lieu of file folders) to use at their assessments for this year. This was a welcome break from our usual science and pleasant since I pretty much had everything except the marshmallows and eggs on hand. If you’d like to see what other homeschool families thought about In The Hands of a Child, Kitchen Science and other products visit The Schoolhouse Review Crew blog.
GrowingForChrist 