Dana and I had the privilege of speaking with a wonderful group of women last night in Summerville, South Carolina. The Summerville LCHEA group invited us to visit and allowed me to speak about our curriculum and graphic organizers, primarily lapbooks. They were so encouraging and excited about Epi Kardia. It really makes all of the hard work seem worthwhile when you get to spend time with homeschool moms who are truly encouraging and love the Lord! Congratulations to Wendy Graham, who won our children’s book drawing. A very special thanks to Debra and Elaine, the leaders of the group, for doing an awesome job. You can tell that there’s a lot going on there and God is in the midst of all of it.

As I was working on gathering materials to bring with us to share with the other homeschool moms, I began exploring the idea of a digital graphic organizer. With a 15 year old son, traditional lapbooks seem childish even though they are still a great way to help him get his thoughts organized, demonstrate what he’s learned and provide me with an assignment for assessment. As well, I love to scrapbook but find less and less time to do so in the traditional way, so I have recently been exploring the idea of using digital scrapbooking. While exploring these options online, I came across a free software that you can download or they will send you a CD if you have downloading issues. This is complete software, not a trial or limited use version. After playing with it for about 15 minutes (it’s very user friendly), I realized that you could actually use this type of software with your kids to create lapbooks and other graphic organizers. I quickly created a vocabulary page and even with looking up definitions online, it only took me about 15 minutes. The only drawback I could find was that the pages are not 8.5 x 11 so printing them is awkward. I moved all of the material up to one section of the page (top right corner if you try this yourself) and I was able to print it. This type of software would be wonderful for creating a lapbook and mailing to grandparents, other family members and friends. You could also upload it on your family’s blog or website. If you’d like to try out the software yourself, simply go to www.scrapbookflair.com to download it. Let us know how you like it and if you come up with any creative ways to use it, be sure to share your ideas! If you know any other free or reasonably priced software out there that might be helpful when creating graphic organizers, please comment and share that information with our community of readers.

To all of those sweet families in Summerville and to your family, too, may God’s blessings shower over your household this school year!

In Him,