A House For Hermit Crab by Eric Carle Lapbook

So we recently discovered lapbooking, or I should say rediscovered since I tried it last year with little success.  This is the third we've done this year and I really loved tying it in with visits to the beach and tidepools to try and find some of the animals in the book and shells we learned about in the lapbook.

We only do a few sections each day (2 or 3) and not everyday since he's just not ready for it yet.  But I think he does like all the gluing he gets to do and it's a break from normal 'school' type projects.  He also LOVES making books he can look at again.  We got this particular lapbook from Homeschool Share as a free download.  It is a level 2 lapbook which is for 4-6 year olds and was the perfect level for my little guy!

Our cover.  I just found a Google image of the book title to use.

When opened up this is the first 'page'.  On the left is a months of the year pocket.  We put the months in order and talked about what the current month was and other important months to him (October for Halloween, June for summer/swimming, December for Christmas).  He counted how many months away these were.  There is also a small book at the top where I wrote how he described a kelp forest.   The middle section is a chart of Hermit Crab's Year where he had to glue the events of the book in order to the months of the story.  On the right at the top is a mini book called "My Address" where we wrote what our address is.  Little Man knows his street address, but not his city so we're still working on it.  Below that I made up my own 'phonics' cards.  We practiced what letter sound each word started with and circled the answer.  I choose Sea Star, Dolphin, Crab, and Fish because those are sounds he is already familiar with and I wanted to show him he knew them.

If you open the middle section up there is another page.  Inside there is a mini book about different kinds of homes, and a mini book about different types of sea creatures.   On the right is flip book with types of shells we might find on the beach and on the bottom a mini book of different vocabulary words found in the story that he may not understand.

Just an example of what our mini book for kinds of homes looks like.  He glued the 'home' into the book and I gave him the words.  For some of the words he actually wanted to trace some of the letters but most of them he did not and I didn't push it.  We read a book about different types of Homes that was suggested in the download for this particular day.

An example of the sea creatures mini book.  He glued all the animal pictures in himself because he was already familiar with most of these animals without my help.