Review: Journey Through Learning Lapbooks

The Greatest Inventors has been a delight to us to use over the past few weeks. We’ve laughed, we’ve talked, and we’ve discovered so much thanks to A Journey through Learning Lapbooks.  Let me tell you all about it!

Now I do need to tell you this… we haven’t gotten as far into this lapbook as we wanted to.  You know what happened?  First we had vacation, then I got a NASTY migraine that wiped me out for a week, so we’ve only worked through the first six or seven inventors.
But it’s been such a delightful process of discovery… we are looking forward to finishing this lapbook up!  

A Journey through Learning Lapbooks is owned by Paula and Nancy.  They started their company with a desire to provide fun and educational studies for homeschooled students to engage with. They know have a team of six individuals that they work with.  They provide good quality lapbooks to supplement various other programs as well.

The Greatest Inventors lapbook dives us into the worlds of 18 different inventors. An Inventor is someone who thinks of new ways to solves problems. As my son commented “Like when Ant-man learned that ants will live in plastic ant homes that he made!”  

 You get a biography for each inventor that touches on the highlights of their life and their notable Invention(s).  Each inventor has a lapbook element to put together.  Some include writing in point form, others longer sections, I found each element was unique to that inventor.   

How we used it.

I printed off the book.  It’s not too bad.  I chose to print off the biography pages though I could have chosen to just read them off the computer, but that just gets complicated sometimes (as I don’t like putting PDF’s on the tablet).  🙂  The lad and I took turns reading the pages and deciding what was important to pull out.  

Occasionally we’d find an invention we didn’t know about.  Like.. swimming fins!  So we would stop and look them and up learn more about them.

One of the inventors I most connected with was John Deere.   Growing up in a farming community I could talk to my lad about the importance of not having clay stick to your digging implements.  This made sense to my lad and he immediately connected that with how hard it is to dig in our clay soil when the clay sticks to our shovels.   It was great to reread our John Deere book. And to reminisce  with my lad about how he used to love the Johnny Deere books and to make our John Deere slide puzzles.    It was great!  🙂

I am looking forward to learning about : Guglielmo Marconi, Louis Braille, Eli Whitney, Robert Fulton, Thomas Jefferson, George Stevenson, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, George Washington Carver, and Alexander Graham Bell among others.

Generally speaking the reading level I’d put around grade 3/4.  But at the end of the book there are ways to expand your studies, with additional books you can read, biography pages and more.

I love the conversations generated between the lad and I.  It’s fun to learn about different people and the activities that shaped their inventions.  How different it was from how we live now.  Where we fly without even thinking about it, and how others risked their lives just to get up off the ground.  Flying a kit to learn about electricity, which again, we don’t even have to think about using, how easy it makes our lives… from heating hot water, to helping us get around at night, and letting us have computers. 

I also liked helping my lad learn to listen to an oral presentation and then learn how to take down notes from that presentation.  He’s got more to learn in this regard but he’s well on his way.  It’s an excellent skill to learn and not one that I anticipated doing this study.   We started him off just using the biographies provided, but then added listening to videos to increase his understanding. 

We liked this lapbook about the Greatest Inventors, and have a desire to keep learning about innovators from around the world. It’s rather fascinating what people can come up with isn’t it?

In case you think you need to make a lapbook with a lapbook study (and dislike the idea of figuring out how to fold your file folders .. despite AJTL’s excellent instructions), you could do what the lad and I do.  We make it into a scrapbook (in essence).  This means we can organize the lapbook elements in the way we want, add extra notebooking or biography pages easily, and put them into a three ring binder for easy storage.  it’s a method that works well for us.   We just paste the elements onto cardstock and we’re done. 🙂   It makes it work for eh?

Vendor:  A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks
Product: The Greatest Inventors Grades 2-8.  There is a study guide included, so this is a stand-alone product.
Received: PDF format ebook.
Price: PDF $8, also available in print for $18.
Reviewed for: The Homeschool Review Crew

Do check out their product list, you may find a fun and educational lapbook to do in your classroom.

 The Crew has been reviewing a number of products from A Journey Through Learning Lapbook,  not only The Greatest Inventors but also:
 Classical Conversations Cycle 3 JUNIOR Activity Book
 Classical Conversations Cycle 3 Activity Book
 An Overview of the 20th Century

Please click here or on the image below to read the reviews.