Jobs lapbook

2 or 3 weeks ago I reached the story of Moses' call with Iona in her morning Bible stories. This led to me telling her about God having a good plan for her life, so I made her a colouring sheet about jobs (the pictures came from DLTK).

Unfortunately, Iona is currently at the stage where she doesn't tend to want to do what I suggest, so not much colouring got done! However, it gave me inspiration for her next lapbook - a 2-week unit on jobs, which she's quite enjoyed.

When we put the lapbook together Iona was the most interested she's been in the process, and insisted on helping to decorate the covers, front and back!

We borrowed various books about jobs from the library, and used them to make mini books about what different professions did:

Where possible, I asked Iona to come up with ideas, after reading each book, of what the person did. As you can see from the first page of the police book, I must admit to using the police as a bit of a threat to her when we're getting in the car! I put that in the book, though, as it was her own words, which is the most involved she's been in any lapbooking.

I was very impressed by how carefully she coloured some of the police book, and even added a lollipop lady to my lollipop sign, as well as adding an RSPCA inspector to the front of that book.

Over the 2 weeks of the unit I tried to theme Iona's Bible readings around jobs, so at the end I made her a quiz of matching the character with their job. She didn't really answer any of them correctly, but I think that was because she wasn't really interested in the activity at the time. This is quite a problem at the moment, when I'm trying to encourage Iona to learn more around specific topics, and particularly when I try to use the "Teach Your Baby to Read" flashcards with her; she appears uninterested and gives silly answers which I think she knows are wrong.

The last page of the lapbook was an attempt to encourage Iona to write. When she gets magazines these days she seems to enjoy "colouring in" large letters which are outlined to encourage children to write over them, so I attempted to reproduce this. I asked her what Daddy did, and what she wanted to do when she grew up (the answer to the latter varies from day to day), then asked her to write over the words, but apart from the "i" in "fairy" she point-blank refused.

One of the Bible stories we read was the wise and the foolish man (builders), so I suggested we make a collage from torn pieces of tissue paper and egg box on a picture I drew. Again, I ended up doing most of the work, although Iona was interested; she preferred to draw her own pictures of things she was interested in at that moment. However, she enjoyed tearing the egg box, and did stick some down. She also agreed to me putting it up on her wall afterwards (sometimes she gets very worked up about me not doing that because she wants to keep working on it, i.e. destroying what's already been done).

Interestingly, although Iona seemed to enjoy and learn from this unit, it had most of an effect on me. For one thing, I am now learning to plan our work more. I recently read a very interesting post on Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett on planning your year with unit studies, and decided to timetable at least some projects at times of the year when I know we are likely to want to do them. This has had the very useful effect of focusing what I do with Iona into a discrete period. In this case, for example, I restricted us to 2 weeks on jobs, so when I reached the end of the second week I forced myself to tie up the lapbook with Iona, despite not having covered all the jobs or books that I'd planned to. What we did seems to have been enough for her, and we didn't end up this time with the unit dragging on and on, so I will try to continue working like this.

Secondly, and most importantly, I realised, after doing Bible studies with Iona stressing that God has a plan for her life, and discussing with her what she could do when she grows up, that it really doesn't matter to me what she does. Previously I've given lip service to the idea that the most important thing is to serve God, whatever he asks of her, but privately I felt I would be deeply disappointed if she didn't go to university. However, since doing this unit I really do feel now that, although I'd still like her to go to university, it really doesn't matter if she doesn't, as God's plan for her is a good one.