Our First Lapbook: Japan

As part of the homelearning theme last month on Japan, Big Bee and I worked on a series of activities over 3 weeks which we collated into a Japan lapbook. 

Big Bee and I read several excellent books for children about Japan, which enhanced her knowledge about the geography and culture of Japan in time for our trip. She was able to identify many aspects of Japanese life from the books she read while we were there. When we were back, we compiled this knowledge into a collection of minibooks that Big Bee adores. She was so amused by the different ways of information presentation compared to the typical worksheets in school. 

It was wonderful to work on a lapbook with a big kid, as she had full autonomy to select the types of activities that she thought was pertinent to this theme. With minimal guidance from me, she was in charge of cutting and folding some of these minibooks (she loved it!) whilst creating the content independently. I find such active involvement will reinforce how she absorbed and remembered the information, and true enough, it made learning so fun for her that she wanted to do a Singapore lapbook in time for National Day!

I thought that Little Bee was too young to be involved in the creation of wordy minibooks, and as she still preferred art & craft as the main mode of learning, I did not create a lapbook for her, although she was highly curious about jie-jie's lapbook! 

Here are some elements from our Japan lapbook. It was such a tremendously fun project that even I am addicted to creating more lapbooks with Big Bee, and perhaps more visual ones for Little Bee!

Cover, designed completely by Big Bee. The Japanese words on the bottom right actually represent her name in Japanese, pronounced as Nikooru!

Inside the lapbook: we worked on a day-by-day highlight of our journey across Japan, the time difference between Japan and Singapore, geographical borders of Japan (sea and land), map location of Japan and her favourite places in Japan in a cute quilt square format that Big Bee loved!

More minibooks under the brown flap! The 4 "wow" matchbooks contain information about Japan that amazed Big Bee (see below picture). We also compared and contrasted seasons and currencies between Japan and Singapore, calculated the distance (5,000 km!) and air travel time between the 2 countries, discovered the popular sports and common religions in Japan, as well as unravelled fascinating facts about the meaning of the Japanese flag.

Back of the lapbook: Map of Japan - Big Bee circled the various cities and places she visited in Japan