castle play and lapbooking

When the sprogits woke up this morning they decided they wanted to play with the castle. It's a pretty awesome castle. It even has a minotaur, a barbarian, a three-headed dragon and a hydra.

They whiled away the whole morning playing. The king of the castle was in charge of guarding an almost extinct three-headed dragon and her nest of eggs (Little), his fairy cousin and her daughter were visiting the castle (Tiny) and the guards were protecting the castle from invaders (Small) using what seemed to be square cannonballs that made machine gun noises. The games flowed seamlessly from being individual games in parallel, to one single collaborative game, to individual games again. I was impressed with how long and how well they played together/next to each other with very few argy bargy episodes.

After lunch they decided they wanted to start on their lapbooks. We cut up the folders we had and started talking about what possible subjects they might like to do.

Little decided she wanted to do cats for her first topic. She started looking in our animal encyclopedia for some information about cats and wrote up almost a page of notes! She then put Explorapedia on on the computer and searched through the topics for all the cat-related ones and wrote another side and a half of notes, and after dinner she fetched out the Big Cats book from the "My Best Book of..." series (we bought several of them on a sale group a while back) and wrote even more! She's really taken on board that to write up a big lapbook she needs to do lots of research, especially about cat species she knows nothing about.

Small asked if he could do water. So, while Little was looking in the encyclopedia Small and I asked mighty Google for images of the water cycle. We found one we liked and spent a while talking about it before he drew it out and then coloured it in. We also talked about the other bits we can do for his book.

Finally, Tiny decided she wanted to do a colour-based book, so we went through some of our old National Geographic mags and ripped/cut out various pictures out which might be good for various topics. She found a picture of a polar bear to use for white, a red car to use for red, and a monkey to use for brown. I think I need to get a large folder order in pronto (we just bought a multipack in a supermarket), as I can see this becoming very addictive!