My Son’s First Lapbook

My son, at 6 years old has a pretty sound understanding of the Pillars of Islam, masha’Allah. But I decided I wanted him to review and to present what he understood in a more creative form. I have recently learned about lapbooking from a great friend, also a home-educator, who has been a source of great inspiration for me.  So I decided a lapbook would be the perfect way for him to present his understanding of the 5 Pillars of Islam. Lapbooking is creative, it’s fun and it really helps information stick in kids heads.

Although his first lapbook isn’t the more common style of lapbook filled with pockets and pop-outs and mini-books, it’s still effective and great for beginners. 

What is Lapbooking?

 

The first thing we did was to get two square pieces of card and glue them together with one piece slightly over-lapping the other. Then we made two folds as can be seen in Photo 1.

Folding the Lapbook

With the topic of the lapbook being the Pillars of Islam, we thought it would be a good idea to make the pages look like pillars. So we chose stone-coloured card and drew pillars to decorate the top of the pages and the front cover as can be seen in Photos 2 and 3.

The Front Cover

Pillars to decorate the cover and subtitles

We discussed the First Pillar of Islam – SHAHADAH. What it is, what it meant and how to recite it in Arabic and English. Then he coloured in some Arabic Calligraphy that depicts the Shahadah with the English language equivalent underneath and stuck it down onto the page. See Photo 4.

Page 1 on the Shahadah

He then continued doing a page on each one of the Pillars, adding coloured drawings, a mini lift-the-flap and glitter to illustrate the pages. We would discuss each pillar and what he wanted to write about before he started each page. It took him two afternoons in total to complete the book.

Page 2 on Salat illustrated with a coloured drawing of a boy performing the prayer.

Page 3 on Zakat decorated with a coloured drawing illustrating giving zakat

Below are the three inside pages of the lapbook, the next Pillar – Ramadhan – continues onto the back of the page on Zakat and likewise, the page on Hajj continues onto the back of the page on Salat until the whole booklet looks like a fold out leaflet.

The 3 Inside Pages on Shahadah, Salat and Zakat

Page 4 on Ramadhan with a crescent moon decorated with glitter and a mini lift-the-flap on Iftar

 

When planning the page on Ramadhan, we thought it would be nice to add in a symbol of the Crescent Moon to better understand the ruling on sighting the moon to mark the beginning of Ramadhan. My son thought it would be nice to decorate it with silver glitter. After deciding what he wanted to write about on the page he soon found out that he didn’t actually have enough space, so I suggested to him that we add in a mini lift-the-flap which covers the Sunnah of Iftar as you can see in the following Photos 9 and 10.

Mini Lift-The-Flap on the Sunnah of Iftar

Mini Lift-The-Flap with a photo of dates stuck down underneath and a short summary on the inside of the flap about the Sunnah of Iftar

We had quite a lot of discussion on the final Pillar – Hajj – and we had to break down the information into short snippets in order to include the important points but to be honest we could have done with another page to include all the finer details about the rituals of Hajj. But insha’Allah, perhaps we could make a lapbook dedicated to Hajj in the near future. My son illustrated the page with a coloured drawing of the Ka’aba and I mentioned to him that it might be a good idea to colour the faces of the people in different colours to show that Muslims come together in unity from all over the world (although this can’t really be seen in the picture below because it was taken at night time in poor light).

Back page on Hajj (photo taken at night time, poor quality)