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Hi,

I am using Beyond and Bigger with my kids. I love it! I am with a charter school and need to have a variety of samples to give my EF once a month.
I have plenty of Language Arts and Math samples. I seem to routinely lack samples in History/ Science. It's because we read about it, discuss, or do something. If I don't snap a pic,then I have no samples. With Bigger, we now have the science notebook! So that will help! I am also teaching my kids Portuguese, but it's all conversation at this point... so no samples for that either.

I was thinking, I could try lapbooking for each week with HOD. I am a little afraid we're going to have too much to do. But maybe one lapbook per week, isn't that much.

Has anyone done this?

We are with a charter school too. I personally find the curriculum complete as is and doing lapbooking pushes us over the edge. I would say show them your DC's handwriting and math, and snap away at pictures. What a great memory you will have!

Thanks Heidi! Ha...yeah I don't want to be pushed over the edge. Yes, photos would be the easiest... Considering.
I would love to see an example, if anyone has done lapbooks with HOD. Not as additional study, but to use what we are already doing with Heart of Dakota.

A question I would have is what do you hope to accomplish by having the lapbooks? If purely for accountability, you have a means there. If it is to provide some sort of tie-up of what you have learned in a particular unit, I can understand that, but knowing Carrie, she would have scheduled it in if she would have seen it necessary. So I'm wondering what your purpose is in wanting to do them?

I don't think the program is lacking anything. It is perfect the way it is. We have plenty to do.

Other than solving the sample problem for 3 of the subjects. I think it would be nice to have the books to look and review what we've learned. It seems that using what we've done and pasting on a folder, +_ some modifications would work. I keep everything they do. I just got the rest of my books, so I am starting Bigger tomorrow. I might just do that with my daughter with Beyond. I think the kids would like it, but not sure I will like the paper/glue mess.

Hello! I just wanted to let you know that you should be doing a science notebook this year with Bigger... I wasn't sure if you knew this already? We keep our notebooks and look back at them as keepsakes, and this has been plenty for us personally. You might read your teacher guide ( i am assuming you have not started because you mention just having got in the "rest" of your books?) and decide or maybe try a week as written and then go from there ! When we did Bigger last year we had two notebooks, one for history and one for science. The science one had a once a week notebooking page and lab page. The history notebook had a once a week notebooking page and we also stored poetry copywork here. I hope this is helpful? I think you will LOVE your year!

That helps. So glad Brandi weighed in! Maybe the notebooking would help? Maybe others have done lapbooks.

We are doing preparing and have decided to go half pace so that we can pace ourselves and enjoy the activities rather than worrying about time.

So this is our plan with lapbooking.

We will spend a week just doing our left hand side of the day plan, just focusing on history. We still do math, english etc everyday. This gives us time to make a lapbook on the topic. We are doing an Egyptian lapbook this week. I am using the rotating box for information to add to our lapbook plus the storytime text. As well as anything they want to add.

The kids are loving it and having fun. They don't feel rushed. They don't have to worry about what we are not getting to because for us it is manageable this way. And they are more engaged in the topic because we are only focusing on one chunk at a time.

Next week we will focus on science and poetry.

This is just our way and what suits our family.

We are doing Beyond and I have kept every activity my son has done from the activity box below history. I have it all in a box. I would think that along with the workbooks and copywork and some action pictures would be plenty as far as accountability. I also have pictures and plan to put them together in a photobook when we are done. On the days you are looking at a map or doing an activity just shoot a couple of pictures and make a note of it.

I thought about this, and it would be very easy to do lapbooking. Instead of putting all your vocabulary words for Bigger in a notecard box, you could staple them onto a section in your lapbook - and do the same with all the artwork that you make. You'd be doing the same work, just storing it differently. It might get complicated with trying to figure out how to divide the work into the lapbooks, though. (You can't put 36 weeks of school into one lapbook.) Still, I think it would be easy to just make a "sample" which is what you need for the charter school, anyway.
If I had to take work in, I'd take pics during two weeks and have all the things that we made included for that two weeks.
But I don't really know what your charter requires. How often do they expect samples?

They expect samples every 20 days, one sample from each subject.

I think I figured out! I started Bigger today. I didn't know he would have a notebook for history as well. So we're good. I can't add another thing. For foreign language, I can type a song or few words on paper and he can illustrate.

My daughter is doing Beyond. We made a lapbook of what we covered today. We didn't even put everything on...still filled it up! I couldn't imaging doing this every day- But I can do it once a month, and pick a day to lapbook about. I will keep everything else we do and take pictures as well.

I printed a coloring page of a mad King James, a map showing Scrooby, a picture of the cover of Benjamin West and one of his paintings. That was fun, to see something he painted as an adult. We wrote, this boy grew up to be the Father of American Painting, with an arrow pointing down to the picture. We also made room for the science experiment and our findings. She observed black/white paper in a dark room. She wrote in a few notes, colored the pics.
She enjoyed the process. She took to her Dad when he got home, and explained what everything was. Everything tied in nicely. We did it as an extra activity, we went about our day as normal. Yeah, couldn't fit one week into one lapbook! LOL

Thanks for feedback! You're all so nice!

Every 20 days!? Wow! At least the science and history notebooks will help, and then you can figure out how to have the samples from math and handwriting. I'm glad it worked out!

Sounds like you had fun with it too!

The ladies are doing a great job of helping you talk through your options. One thing I think you'll find as you travel through HOD is that you will have more than enough samples of work to show your charter, even every 20 days. While you could make your own lapbook to show your charter as you go, I think you'll be surprised that it probably won't be necessary, because you'll have what you need purely through the work samples created from doing the program as written.

It is always up to you on how to handle what you need to provide for your state, but we've never found that any our our guides needed to have anything added to show for documentation as you will truly have a very full portfolio throughout the year from the guide already. If you did choose to add lapbooking, I would recommend doing it on the 5th day each week, and then not doing the HOD guide on that day. You could instead teach the HOD program 4 days a week, leaving the extra day each week free to pursue your own interests, like lapbooking. In this way it will balance your workload each week for both you and your kiddos and allow you to add what you desire. Then, you'd just go 9 extra weeks into the next school year to finish your HOD guides.

Which ever way you choose to go, I just wanted to assure our board readers that it isn't necessary to add to the plans in HOD in order to provide a portfolio. Your kiddos will have a binder full representing every subject area as they complete the HOD guide throughout the year.

We pray you will enjoy your time spent with HOD! We'll look forward to enjoying the journey with you.

Blessings,
Carrie

Thanks!

I just started Bigger and enjoy it very much. The state req. here is one page per week for science and history, so I would think you would be fine with the notebooking. I have been doing lap books with my kids for the last year in our old curriculum, and I will say that one per week is a lot to do from my perspective....especially if you have them write everything. We always did about 6-8 pieces or so for each lapbook, so it took some time---2-3 weeks were scheduled into the curriculum to complete them(and my kids did them together--sharing the workload). Our history lapbooks typically included something on art of the period, the flora and fauna, geography, a fact, religion, govt. etc... Lapbooks can be fun but they are time consuming sometimes. If you decide to try it out, then perhaps set a goal of doing just one or two pieces a week. Hope that helps, Jen