American Revolution Lapbook

Cover of Johnny Tremain

We have spent about a week on the American Revolution Lapbook that I downloaded free from Just Us.

Based on the book Johnny Tremain, the lapbook covers all the major events of the revolution such as ~

The Boston Massacre, The Boston Tea Party, Tyranny vs. Liberty, the Declaration of Independence, the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Saratoga,  Minute Men, Guns, Valley Forge, Forts, the Treaty of Paris, Government, Sons of Liberty, pride, fear,  plus plenty of vocabulary building activities, timelines, maps, definitions, and several scriptures on the topic.

As I shared before in a post on Time-Saving Tips for Doing Lapbooks , we paste in all the minibooks on our lapbook folders before we write in them.

I hate it when the minibooks are crowded and confused on the table and inevitable minibooks get ‘lost’.  So, I handed each child their ziplock bag of minibooks (which I had cut out quietly one evening) and some notebook pages and they arranged them and pasted them on the pages as they wished.  My youngest chose coloured blank paper instead of the History Notebook pages.

This was a large lapbook download and the girls used 7 to 8 pages each for all the minibooks.

Notebook pages with silver paper file clip on the left

We punched the pages and clipped these in a simple cardboard file folder instead of a lapbook folder.   I trimmed the tops and bottoms of the file folders so that they are slightly larger than the notebook pages, but small enough to fit in our files.

File folder trimmed, with duct tape punched to file

Because we would work with the folder for a week, I used my favourite item, duct tape, and taped the side edge to punch and insert in the children’s files. 

What is lovely about this system is that we simply take the folder out, grab the coloured pens and we are ready to read, research, discuss, and write.  It takes a few minutes to find the minibook, but there is no gluing and faffing about.

The lapbook was a great retrospective activity and an excellent way to consolidate the work we had covered in our History core.

We are still busy reading Johnny Tremain every night.  I remembered this book was long the first time I used Sonlight, but it seems to have grown even longer the second time round! 🙂 None the less, the girls enjoy this book even though it is a “boys” book, and it has transported us into the lives and times of the American Revolution era.

If you plan to study American History I suggest you pop over to Just Us an download this lapbook and keep it in a file.

Here’s a planning tip:

Draw up a basic vertical timeline of your History period you wish to study and mark the dates for all the most important events.  Then spend some time looking for free downloads, lapbooks, pictures, hands-on activities and jot it on your timeline.  This timeline will give you a birds’ eye view of your core, your activities and downloads and the time you need for each theme.

Print out the table of contents with every download and keep this with the lapbook instructions.

Blessings,