School. Is. Out!!

Yes, the Falk Academy of Learning is official out for the year! Yippee (insert happy dance here)!! Well, to be truthful, AJ has a couple of pages left in his math workbook but none of it is new information and therefore very independent work. Both boys have been finished with their Language and Phonics for about 3 weeks and geography was finished about 2 weeks ago. Science was completed today as we finished the last couple of pages in Apologia's Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day (which we all loved - next year it is Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day!). These are the two lap books they made that accompany that study.

I bought them through knowledgeboxcentral (I think) and though it was great for me as it was the first lap book we did, I won't buy the pre-made ones again. I have a specific way I like to do the lap books utilizing the space the best way possible and as many different fonts as necessary to make it artistically fun to look at. I also cannot stand when the text box has been left around the text or when all cutting lines and folding lines appear the same as a solid black line (for me, solid lines are cutting lines, dotted lines are folding lines).

Back to the point! Though I am glad that school is done for now, I really enjoyed teaching the kids this year. It is certainly a stretching experience, mostly in my character development, but I am so thankful yet again that I have the freedom to teach my family throughout the day about more than just school subjects! We are able to have great talks, lots of laughs (admittedly, some tears), fun activities and a whole lot of together time. I always say that we will take this homeschooling journey one year at a time but I am positive we will be embarking on this journey yet again come September. After all, I received their geography curriculum for the next couple of years this week and I am excited to start prepping it!

So, what now? Well! Let's see, there is major organizing/decluttering/cleaning that needs to happen, some painting, a few beds need to be built, a bunch of sewing to complete to name just a few summer projects. I MUST learn to manage my time better. I am a terrible time manager and yet I still manage to accomplish a good deal. Not as much as I would like but enough. Imagine all I could accomplish if I would manage my time better. A few things I would like to see happen that are seriously lacking right now - quiet time for me each morning, a time to workout each day and time to craft/create each week plus a better cleaning routine. Those are things that are of utmost importance to me so this summer I must learn to manage my time! I some tools to help with that so we shall see how that goes. But, for the remainder of this week, I will just marvel at what we accomplished this year and do a bit of cleaning. Maybe we will take a day to spend in the country doing some more tree-clearing there. That is, if it stops raining!

Any plans for your summer?

Lapbook of Jordan

This is the final lapbook we made for our geography course this year. The boys enjoyed this one especially because Jay was able to tour some of the locations we talked about when he went to Jordan a number of years ago. Jay brought back a keffiyeh and a Jordanian newspaper so both were quite amusing for the kids.

I discovered the boys really enjoy learning about the countries of our world, the peoples that live there, the land that fashions it, the languages spoken - all those fun things. Because of that, next year we will study more of the world using the curriculum called Galloping the Globe. I ordered it this week along with some of the additional resources needed. We will be doing a lapbook/notebook approach this time, using a binder and dividing it into the continents. We will study a few countries on each of the continents and will try to include those countries where we personally know missionaries live. What a great way to study this wonderful world God created! And this time, RJ gets to join us on our geography journey. Yes, I know she is only 5 but she already begged to join the boys this year as they studied geography. Why hold her back when she is so eager?

To find all the lapbooks on this geography course, click the country names below:

Turkey

Israel

Egypt

Iraq

Saudi Arabia

As always, just email me if you want the file for any of the lapbooks I have made - I will gladly share with you!

Lapbook of Saudi Arabia

Here is the lapbook of Saudi Arabia the boys made:

Find additional lapbooks of the Holy Land here:

Turkey

Israel

Egypt

Iraq

Lapbook of Iraq

We are finished our geography course for this year and it has been a blast! The boys have really enjoyed studying the Holy Land as presented in A Child's Geography - Explore the Holy Land by Ann Voskamp. We finished the study of Iraq last month already but I never got around to posting pictures of the lapbooks. Here is Iraq:

As I mentioned earlier, if you are wanting the file for this lapbook, just send me an email. I will gladly share it with you! Tomorrow, I will show you our lapbook of Saudi Arabia.

Lapbook on Egypt

At the end of last week, we completed our third of six lapbooks in our Geography course, A Child's Geography - Explore the Holy Land. The boys really enjoyed studying Egpyt: learning about ancient Egypt, about modern-day Egypt and how so many important Old Testament stories actually happened in this fascinating country! I am continuing to learn so many new things myself and I love to create new little mini-books each week. I absolutely love how the author of our text (see below) weaves in stories of the country we are studying, truths from Scripture, and explanations of how the geography of the region shapes our lives and when we mess with that geography as God created it, consequences happen. Now we will take a one week break before heading into our next country of study - Iraq! Once again, if you need a lapbook to accompany the Egypt chapters of Ann Voskamp's A Child's Geography - Explore the Holy Land, send me an email and I will gladly send you the file. (A couple of readers asked for the Israel lapbook and I was delighted to send it their way!) So, this is what the boys' lapbook of Egypt looks like!

Lapbook on Israel

Shalom! This week we finally finished our lap book on Israel. Earlier I showed you our completed lap book on Turkey. Israel was the next country we were studying in our tour of the Holy Land. We are using Ann Voskamp's text A Child's Geography - Explore the Holy Land and we love it! I think the study of Israel was especially fun for the boys as Jay spent a bit of time in Israel before we met. He has a whole photo album of pictures he took of the exact same places we talked about in our study. So, he could talk about those fascinating locales with more detail than the books and was able to answer the boys' questions. They really love studying these countries as they can now picture where people like Jesus or Abraham or John the Baptist lived and died. What a great way to make the Bible really come to life! I also found a Hebrew printing practice sheet for them to try writing the Hebrew Aleph Bet in block letter style. They really enjoyed that. They also loved seeing their names written in Hebrew and will now sometimes write their names in Hebrew on their assignments! Next week we start our study on Egypt and I am really looking forward to learning more about that country!

If you are using Ann's book while studying Israel and looking for a lap book, send me an email and I will gladly send you the file! Why not save you the hours of work it took me to make it?! :)

Lapbook on Turkey

Merhaba! Hello (for all you non-Turkish speakers!). For geography this year, we will be studying a book called "A Child's Geography - Explore the Holy Land". I am really excited about doing this study but wanted to be sure the boys would be able to retain the knowledge they will gain. Enter lapbooks! If you have never heard of lapbooks, you are not alone. I had only heard of them for the first time just about a year ago when we were discussing what we would be doing at the homeschool co-op we are joining this year. A lapbook is a folder of information pertaining to a particular subject. This folder contains lots of mini-books of bite-sized chunks of information. At the end of your study of that topic you have a creative book filled with information that is presented in a lot more interesting of a manner than just a notebook filled with writing. That is a very simplistic definition but it gets the point across. You can find lapbooks all over the web for many different topics. I could not find a lapbook for this particular study so what is a girl to do? Make one! Now, A Child's Geography covers 6 different countries in the Holy Land area so we are going to take a full month to study each country. I have finally completed the lapbook for the first country, Turkey. I had to make a sample so I knew how all of it would be arranged. I loved doing it and the boys are excited about making their own. I made all the templates on my computer then printed them out on really colorful paper. The boys will fill in all the information and cut them out during the appropriate lesson. I read somewhere that colorful paper is a better way to retain the info plus it looks better so that is what I used. I also found a tonne of colorful file folders at the thrift store for a couple pennies each. They were already written on the tab so I just cut the tabs off. I actually like the slightly smaller size better since this way I can put each lapbook in a plastic page protector and put them all into a binder. Anyway, without any further ado, here is my lapbook on Turkey to accompany the first chapter in "A Child's Geography - Explore the Holy Land".

{This is how it closes. The front cover will be decorated by the boys - I didn't decorate mine}

{Inside - all the mini books are closed}

{Inside - some of the mini-books are open. There are a lot of fill-in-the-blanks but not huge amounts of writing.}

{The back of the lapbook - a map of Turkey the boys will have to label.}