Laura Ingalls Wilder Study and lapbook

Warning...lots of pictures and instructions on how to make this lapbook. Enjoy you homeschool and or crafty moms. Hope to be a place of resource for you. You can click on the picture to enlarge it so you can see what it looks like.
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We have just finished studying Laura Ingalls Wilder for school and it has proven to be a huge favorite topic to study. I read some biographies from the local library to the girls and we started gathering information to make a lapbook. The girls also have been reading the books on their own for fun and we have also discovered the show on TV. To finish it off, we attended a Laura Ingalls Wilder presentation from a local librarian at a womens meeting at my neighbor's church.

Here are the girls with our sweet neighbor lady. Of course they wore their prairie dresses and bonnets. Sad to say, those are getting too small. I am fighting the urge to make them some more dresses. Here are the girls with the lady who gave the nice presentation and another HS girl and her super cute prairie dress (the dress that got me thinking about making ones for my kiddos).







We have really enjoyed lapbooking and I am really amazed at how much information the kids retain from this kind of learning. Totally hands on. Totally creative. And they want to look back at the books and show them to any willing audience. =)

While I read to the girls, they were making the mini books that go in the lapbook. I do the cutting, and they do the rest. We used a color copy from one of our first (geared for young readers) Laura books as a cover. On the back cover, we made a pocket for misc. timeline info we found.


So far, we have stuck to the traditional shutter fold folders glued to each other. This lap book was 2 folders connected. The orange MAP book included maps from Laura's travels. On the left flap were info about her family (parents, siblings, children...)Inside the first flap we made a book about different jobs Laura had and included some illustrations from the Little House books. The large purple and white book is another map and all the towns she lived in.

The yellow book is opened here to show ALL the times Laura moved. As I was reading the biography, we kept a log of this and then the girls put this in the wagon book (got the wagon from enchanted learning).

On the left is a small blue mini book with a map of where the Little House books take place. We learned that not all books are exactly like Laura's life. On the bottom right is a blue and white book that tells when she was born and died.
Here is a accordion fold mini book with open flaps that show all the different kinds of houses Laura lived in. Everything from a log cabin to a sod house to the final home of Rocky Ridge farm that she and Almanzo owned.

This mini book is a flip book that lists all of Laura's books and when they were published (several published after her death). Then the girls included their own art for each book. That allows them to draw and be extra creative.
This picture shows an accordion style fold mini book that lists all the difficult things that took place during the first 4 years of Laura and Almanzo's marriage. You can also see the red mini book that we made for the family album. We included some pictures of the different members of Laura's family (remember, she really wasn't Melissa Gilbert).