Whale Lapbook

This week Gavin has been working hard on his whale lapbook and it is finally completed! 

Here are some pictures from the week.

This was a counting with starfish game, numbers 1 - 12.  We are starting to work more on numbers 11 - 20.

And the final result!

The big whale on the left you can move to show Jonah in his belly.  The coloring page has a Bible verse about God creating the creatures of the ocean.  The orca is a simple whale parts label: dorsal fin, flippers, blowhole, eye and flukes (the parts we learned).  His counting with starfish is on there and some whale fact cards that have some of the facts we have learned.  These were already printed out so he didn't write them. 

Inside the top right flap with the tide pool Gavin wrote down some of the animals that live in a tide pool and in the flap with the coral reef Gavin wrote down that coral looks like a plant but is really an animal.

In the flaps at the top with the different whales Gavin wrote down either Teeth or Baleen depending on what type of whale it is and he wrote down how long they get.  We actually went outside this weekend with a tape measure and a piece of sidewalk chalk and measured out a blue whale (90 feet long), humpback (70 feet long) and a narwhal (20 feet long).  Gavin really likes the narwhal - he thinks the tusk is really cool!

Anyway, under the flaps with the photos of the whales Gavin wrote the word for what the picture is showing: flukes, blowhole, breaching and throat grooves. 

Then we put a pocket for some shell pictures and names since we learned about shells.  Gavin wrote 'how whales find food' for echolocation, I thought that would be much easier than having him try to define it, that would take a lot of words!  We have some whale vocabulary word accordian folds with just the words, not the definition and then the blue paper with cuts going up is actually a flap for what baleen whales eat.  Gavin cut the paper to look like baleen and he glued pictures of plankton, krill and copecods under it.  He thought this was really neat and likes to lift the 'baleen' to see the food.

On the back Gavin colored the oceans on a picture of the world, then glued the words Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic where they belong.  He did really good finding the continents to use as identifiers considering this map was an outline and he is used to maps with color for everything.  I was impressed because I thought he'd be confused.

The pictures are a bit morbid, but they actually show beached whales (humpback on top and blue whale on bottom) next to a person so you get a good idea of their size. 

Calla was over yesterday and my camera was out of battery but I did get this picture of her playing with the airplane.  It makes airplane noises and she thought it was really neat!

And here is Austin.

Not the greatest picture but I didn't want to leave him out!  He loves to rip up catalogs for me!

And, Gavin's teacher said he needs to practice his cutting skills some more so he's been doing a few cutting exercises... and I made him cut most of the stuff for his lapbook too!