Flapbooks

Last week, we worked on 2 flapbooks, customised to the Bees' different learning levels. As part of her Japan lapbook, I recommended to Big Bee that it might be very meaningful for her to list down all our trip highlights in a day-by-day format within a book. She loved the idea and when I created a flapbook together with her, she set forth to work on this project immediately with zest. 

Little Bee wanted a part of this project, of course. Whilst it was apparent why she could not work on a similar holiday project, I adapted her flapbook to something that she can personally write on - so that she can practise her writing skills and more importantly, to feel very involved in the creation process. As I am quite keen for her to be familiar in writing numerals, we created a flapbook for the numbers 1 to 10! 

Dense concentration...but only for a while! 

They both worked earnestly on these flapbooks - Little Bee for about 20 minutes (as that is the limit of her usual attention span!) whereas Big Bee wrote intermittently on hers over 2 days (she was still in her holiday mood and was not too used to writing loads yet!). 

Cover of Big Bee's flapbook with labels of the days in our trip.

Dates of our trip with brief highlights of each day. This is a remarkable way to let Big Bee remember our vacation, as she mentally ran through with me what we did each day. I found it very worthwhile, especially when we have post-vacation blues! 

Little Bee's number flapbook. Maverick her drew an arrow at "1", proclaiming that "1" could look like an arrow. She needed my help in writing "2", so I drew dots for her to follow. But she wrote the rest of the numbers independently. She drew a heart beside "9" because she told me she thought that was the nicest written number of all.

Inside her flapbook: I got her to draw out the number of items for each number (you can imagine the amount of coaxing as we approached "10"!) and also got her to write out the corresponding words for each number. She was rather distracted by then, so I had to use dots to lure her to write these words!

I found that projects which involved their direct creation and writing tended to be more memorable for the Bees. And true enough, the Bees kept referring to their finished flapbooks and could not stop showing them to their Papa and Grandma!