When we talked briefly about astronomy we used some activities from an astronomy lapbook and a moon lapbook to make notebook pages.

When we talked about animals we copied and labled a diagram of a fly, and made bird notebooks by cutting out pictures of birds from magazines and adding some information about them to the notebook pages. (The kids took about a week to complete these…working on them each day because they enjoyed it so much – one of my kids made so many pages we had to make it into a book and couldn’t put it in her notebook).

When we talked about Egypt we made mini books on different aspects of what we were studying.  We also made notebook pages about our field trip (which I will tell you about below).

When we talked briefly about the human body we did some activities from a lapbook about the human heart, as well as doing some diagrams of the 5 senses (I added these activities to our study because the kids were interested in learning more about the body than what was provided by the curriculum).

2.  Lapbooking – We have been fortunate to find some good lapbooks to go along with some things we were studying.  This was something I added to our study, and was not a part of the scheduled curriculum.  The children enjoyed doing these activities very much.  We never used every activity in the lapbook, but rather chose the ones that most interested us or fit our study the best. 

We didn’t make traditional lapbooks by glueing the lapbook activities to a file folder.  Instead we chose to glue the lapbook activities to colored card stock so they could be easily inserted in sheet protectors and kept with the rest of our notebook pages in each child’s notebook.

3.  Field Trip – We were so blessed to be able to attend an exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts at an art museum.  It was a day trip and very much worth the drive to see these amazing atrifacts.  I think it made the study of Ancient Egypt come to life.  It was as if there was suddenly a more realistic view of these people and helped the kids see that these were real people…not just a story in a book.  We came home and used our brochures along with small items we purchased in the gift shop at the museum (such as papyrus with egyptian designs on it) and made pages to place in our notebooks.  This will be a great reminder of the things they saw, and the only way we could notebook pictures of some of the artifacts since the museum didn’t allow photography in the exhibit.

4.  Playing Senet – Senet is an ancient Egyptian board game.  We actually were able to see a Senet board and playing pieces in the exhibit, before we reached the part of the curriculum where we actually played the game.  MFW provided a drawing of the board and we used small plastic chess pieces (they came in a travel sized game set) for our playing pieces and made our own throwing sticks out of popcicle sticks.  It took a bit to get the hang of the game, but the kids enjoyed it once we learned all the rules.  This activity was scheduled in the curriculum, and we really enjoyed it.

Here are a few pictures from some pages we did in our notebooks this year. 

This astronomy page is activities from an the "Astronomy Lapbook E-book" from Knowledge Box Central.

These are a couple of pages on Egypt from my oldest child’s notebook.  The first picture is a drawing he did of an Egyptian temple with obelisks.  The second picture contains two mini books (The Empire of Hammurabi and Ancient Egyptian Math), a drawing of an obelisk, and a summary of Queen Hatshepsut.

These pages are from our bird study.  The first is my oldest dd’s cover page for her bird book.  The second is a page on Hummingbirds.  Images and printed text on these pages came from Birds N Blooms magazine, and excellent resource if you are studying birds.  The kids enjoyed looking for bird pictures in magazines.

Next time I’ll talk about what I liked about MFW, and tell you a couple of things that didn’t work for us about the curriculum …so come on back when you get a free minute!

Blessings!