The Sea Turtle Lapbook!

LOVE the paint job, A!

In April we went to watch the Leatherback turtles nest at Sandy Point. It was an amazing experience and if you want to read about read my earlier post.  In response to that experience, A and I started working on a lapbook about Sea Turtles. At first, I thought we might just make it about Leatherbacks, but then I decided that we might as well study all of the sea turtles out there. Not in depth mind you, but at least a brief overview of each type of sea turtle and their habitats, appearance, etc.  At some point, the lapbook got completely away from us and took on a life of its own.  I had to run away screaming and A lay hiding under the bed for about a month before we took it out again. To our relief, it had calmed down(oxygen deprivation maybe?) and we finished it. That experience went to show us how we could really get into a project and how it could take over. At one point I was up until 2a.m. looking up turtle anatomy….. Craziness!

A created all the pages on her own. She came up with the game page, and learned how to make holes and set eyelets.  She painted the turtle, cut, pasted, etc.  My favorite part is when we recreated a leatherback hatchling and made it weigh an average weight of a real hatchling.  We used Math, Reading, Geography, Social Studies, and Science in this project. We created Turtle poetry, measured a real turtle, read a science book on sea turtles, basically lived and breathed sea turtles for what seemed like AGES.  I think that a few of the pages might need some captions or some written explanation on them yet, but you know what? That’s OK, it’s her work of art and her work, so even I think it’s missing something I’m going to leave it the way it as. I can hope that she looks back in years to come and enjoys reading her very own Sea Turtle Lapbook!

Each scute has a vocab word under it with it's definition.