Lapbooks and Cheesecake!

Let me take a minute to address my post regarding Staples new rewards program for teachers.  I thank everyone who commented.  It seems I am not alone in my dismay with this revised program.  Please, reach out to Staples and let them know how you feel, whether you agree with me or agree with them.  It is important for our voices to be heard either way.  I would love to see them revert back to the old program or at least offer up some reason as to why the change was necessary.

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I wrote a post a while back about foldables and lapbooks.  If you haven't seen the post, go visit.  I was able to link to some great pdfs of foldable books by Dinah Zike, the queen of all things foldable! :-)  I used some of her foldable ideas on lapbooks my friends were working on recently.  I have done lapbooks on occasion before, but they are not a staple in my teaching for one main reason; they take a long time to get done!  While I do believe they are worth every minutes spent on them, the current curriculum I have to follow does not allow me to linger.  I know that they can be done in less time if you do them on a smaller scale, but mine always seem to take on a life of their own! 

I like doing them because you can really do so much with them.  Most importantly, my friends love the project feel of it all.  Every time I have done them, my friends are always eager to work.  Also, when they see their final project completed, they are a little in awe of themselves.  Love it!

In our guided reading groups, my friends were working in three different books, one on volcanoes, one on King Tut, and the last on the history of Jazz music.  Speaking of which, on a total aside, do you know the Cheesecake song as sung by Louis Armstrong?  If you don't know it, watch this!  I show this to my friends every year, and we end up singing it all year long.  I promise you will have this song stuck in your head!  And, just wait for Bing Crosby to come hopping through!  Too funny!

Isn't that just great!!!!  We will often substitute the word cheesecake with pizza or tacos or any featured lunch menu item. Any two syllable word will work.  Most of my friends are also in their second year of instrumental lessons, so they love seeing some of the instruments they play featured.

Anyway, back to lapbooks!  I thought I would show you some of what we did.  I forgot to get pictures of the Jazz books, but here is some of what my friends did with Volcanoes and King Tut.  Be warned, many pictures to follow!

One of the big lessons for this activity was getting my friends to effectively summarize and show synthesis.  I'm happy to say they did a very nice job.  What was also another perk was the interest my friends had for the books they didn't read. Once they saw the various lapbooks, they wanted to read all the books.

I have to say, I do love doing lapbooks with my friends.  But, for me, it can be very time consuming.  It also requires a lot of pre-planning.  You have to have the foldable papers cut to size and ready to go.  You also have to carefully plan what you will be doing with each section.  You also need to be prepared for that friend whose fine motor skills make a mess of the folding!  Always have some extras ready to go!

Having said that, I will definitely be doing lapbooks again next year.  :-)

Foldables and Lapbooks

The topic of Foldables came up at a meeting recently, and I was very surprised at the number of teachers who did not know what they were.  I know many of my colleagues have used them on occasion but perhaps they just may not have been aware that they were known as Foldables.  So, of course, the blogger in my brain said, "Ah ha!  A blog topic!"  I'm hoping this is not new information for most of you!  If it's not, keep reading because I found some great resources to share at the end.  If it is new, I think you will want to start using these soon.

So, have you used Foldables?  They are sort of interactive 3-D graphic organizers your friends make.  They can stand alone, such as the ones my friends make when we studied Sir Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion.  The picture below shows some stand alone foldables and is from  Mrs. W's blog Fifth Grade Life.  The link will take you to a post she did on how she used foldables, along with geography vocabulary foldable project with a rubric.

Or, and these are the ones I like best, Foldables can be incorporated into your friends notebooks.  You can make a Foldable that is glued into your friends notebook or make it out of pages of their notebook.

Source for both pictures

Sometimes, Foldables become the notebook and, I believe, this is what they now call Lapbooks.  Lapbooks tend to deal entirely with one topic.  An example of one is in this post I wrote where I showed you a laws of motion lapbook from this science web page which shows you an assortment of different lapbooks.

You have to give credit where credit is due. 

The queen of Foldables has to be Dinah Zike. 



Dinah Zike

 She has a huge number of books out there that will tell you just how to make your own.  If you really want to know more about them, visit Dinah Zike's Web Page.  There is a lot of information there.  If you visit Amazon and search Dinah Zike Foldables, as I did on this link, it will take you to over 247 matches!  She has tons of books that cover different age levels and instructional subjects.  You are bound to find something you like.

However, in looking around the web, I found a nice assortment of free resources.  Here are some links to Dinah's books that were available online as PDFs:

Dinah Zike's Teaching Reading and Study Skills    This one is really geared more toward social studies, but the foldable directions are there.

Dinah Zike's Teaching Math with Foldables  Love this one for upper elementary or even middle school.  This is a pre-algebra edition, but don't let that scare you.  I noticed that most of the examples are exactly what I am teaching in 5th grade.  Even if you aren't teaching older friends, the directions for the Foldables are all there and can easily be used at any grade level.  Just change the topic.

 Foldables by Dinah Zike  This one I love.  This book is geared toward reading.  In fact, on page 42 of this book there is a great chart that correlates specific reading skills to the foldable best suited for it.  I had found this on the web and just saved it in my documents.  I forgot to bookmark the web page, and now I can't find it.  Instead, I this link will take you to Google docs where I put up my copy.  I've only linked to a Google doc once before, so I'm never sure if I get it right.  If the link doesn't work, sorry!

I also found some other links that weren't Dinah Zike, but good resources as well.

Explicit instructions on how to fold several different types of foldables  This link might be helpful if you get confused on just how to fold.  It's also kid friendly in its directions, so you could always print out the page and just give it to your friends to follow.

Examples of Foldables and Lapbooks  This web site from Catawba County Schools has actual student examples of different Foldables and Lapbooks.  It's nice to take a look at so you get an idea of how they are being used.

So, those are some of the Foldable resources I found online.  They are a great way to get your friends involved as active learners and break up the normal routine. 

One more thing.  If we are going to be doing all this folding, we might as well have some fun with it!  Check out this link.  Maybe, probably, totally not appropriate for your friends, but fun to look at!     Paperfoldables