The Greatest Inventors from A Journey Through Learning ~ Homeschool Crew Review

 

We have long-enjoyed lap booking in our homeschool.  The bite-size bits of information written in specially folded little books and collected in a neat folder is something all of my learners have enjoyed. One of the first suppliers for the lapbooks we have used is A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks. We jumped at the opportunity to do another review of this great homeschool resource. We chose The Greatest Inventors Lapbook to work on during our summer break. We’ll be doing physics for science this year, so this seemed like a fun introduction to this broad field of science. Now, not all of the inventors are physicists and not all physicists are inventors, but there is enough overlap here that I am going with it. [Mom Prerogative and all that]

 

The Greatest Inventors Lapbook is one of the Stand-Alone Topical Lapbooks from A Journey Through Learning (AJTL). This means that the information for completing the lapbook is included with the lapbook. For our lapbook, we used the downloadable pdf. The page (or three) for each inventor is directly before the page (or two) needed for the mini-booklet. You can use these stand-alone books in many ways. The pages needed for one part can be printed out and handed over to your learner so that they can complete it as an assignment. When we have used them this way, it has been when a child had difficulty keeping themselves productively occupied when their regular schoolwork was finished. You know, code for kept getting into mischief with too much time on their hands. We have also used these topical studies to supplement curricula. In this case, the lapbook served both purposes.

Not only do I find the topic of inventors a great lead-in to our science studies, but we have covered some of these famous men in our history studies or will be in the coming year.  We learned about Galileo Galilei as we did some astronomy in prep for the recent eclipse.  We read more about the Wright brothers as part of our continuing explorations into aviation.  Our family has an interest in photography, so we enjoyed reading about George Eastman and his inventions.  And we learned about someone totally new to us, Guglielmo Marconi.  He was the inventor of, well, I’m not saying, but we sure are grateful for what it has led to.  You will have to do this study yourself to find out (or Google, but that is cheating!)

The inventors included in the guide (18 overall if you count the Wright brothers as one) span time from the 1400s to the 1900s. We completed the 3rd year of our history cycle and are going into our 4th. You could even work on the lapbook over a longer period of time, completing the booklets as you encounter them in your history studies. Once you have half or so of the booklets finished (or wait until they are all done), then you can start assembling the completed lapbook.

The Great Inventors Lapbook from AJTL not only has the study guide and mini-booklets but additional resources. For our summer study, we have utilized these to make our study richer and to spread the work among four of the children, the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th graders. The included enrichment pages were used for narrations, book reports, and organization of what they have learned. These are not needed to complete the lapbook but are for those looking to dig deeper into the topic.

 

Topical studies are not all A Journey Through Learning produces lapbooks for.  We have utilized their lapbooks that coordinate with favorite curricula and literature.  We have utilized their lapbooks for little ones and older learners.  To read more reviews of the various lapbooks reviewed by the Crew, simply click the image below.