Sesame Street Lapbook

Now that the holidays are over, and we don't have our Christmas Countdown activities any more, I want to work on doing some more intentional learning activities with Peeper.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I've been doing a lot of reading about various approaches, strategies, techniques and activities. One type of activity that comes up alot is lapbooking.

A lapbook is made using a file folder, and can include minibooks or other paper manipulatives. Older students can make them to summarize what they've learned in a particular unit of study, parents can make them to present several toddler learning activities in one handy container, or anything in between.

I've been thinking about trying this with Peeper, but wasn't sure that she was ready for it yet. Yesterday, I stumbled on a PDF of activities for a Sesame Street lapbook, so (with some encouragement from DoulaK, who's done them with her kids, and said she's totally ready for it) I thought I'd give it a try.

Given that it's our first one, I put it all together myself during naptime, and just presented the finished product to her when she got up.

I don't have a functional color printer at the moment (I suspect that new ink cartridges might help the situation) so I printed it in black and white and added the color myself. It could be prettier, but she was very excited when she saw it, and she seemed to enjoy doing the couple of activities that we worked on this evening.

The cover of the lapbook.

The inside of the lapbook. The middle activity says "Help Elmo find all the shapes." She identified all the colors and most of the shapes. I helped her with "rectangle" and "oval."

This flippy minibook thingy asks the kid to color each character the appropriate color. We haven't done it yet.

Put the Elmos in order by size. She could mostly show me the biggest one, then the biggest of the three that were left, and so on, and then again with smallest. She wasn't perfect at it, but she definitely knows big vs little. Doing four is hard, though, because it's not just "big, little and middle."

Counting bats. We haven't done this yet either.

Here she is checking it out. 

This one is just about identifying the different characters. As you can imagine, she aced it!

No idea why these are so blurry.