How to Make a Snake Life Cycle Lapbook? If you find yourself researching reptiles, you can’t possibly leave out our forked-tongue friends the snakes
Like all animals in the web of life, snakes play an important role in our ecosystem by maintaining a balance to the food web. Because snakes are both predators and prey, they keep the pest population down by feeding on mice and other small rodents that damage crops and carry disease.
How to Make a Snake Life Cycle Lapbook
From eggs to the shedding of a skin, we will cover the snake life cycle stages and make the journey both fun and engaging for the little student of yours!
So many people misunderstand reptiles and think of snakes as slimey, dangerous, and often poisonous critters. We aim to prove that all wong with this lapbook project!
When trying to teach the littles about them – the best way to do it is debatable. My mom always used learning posters, but the updated version of that is the concept of a homeschool Lapbook.
It is basically just a folder that helps you organize the information you are learning – pictures, mini flip books, and writing/research are all added and when folded up? It fits in your lap, hence the name “lapbook”.
It is the process of creating a lapbook on a specific subject. It uses creative means to display unit studies, topics, or your project to help aid in the learning process as the subject is researched and learned. It is an active learning process. The most common lapbook background is a standard manilla folder.
It is merely a way to organize the research on a certain subject and keep it all organized.
That is what we are going to do today – make a Snake Life Cycle lapbook to teach about this amazing woman! It all starts with a plain manilla folder and then our printables. The rest is up to you and your little student!
What you need for the Snake Life Cycle Lapbook project
A manilla file folder, scissors, glue, and your choice of crayons, markers, or colored pencils. Add our free printable (below) and you are ready to rock out your research!
This is a gateway for further snake education
There are a lot of questions people have about snakes, ranging from how long do they live, down to what month do snakes have babies. First of all, most snakes do not have babies, they lay eggs!
Snakes that lay eggs have babies that hatch in late summer and fall; those that do not lay eggs hold their babies in the body and give live birth in late summer and fall.
A great follow up to this snake life cycle lapbook lesson might be to find out what kinds of snakes have babies instead of laying eggs.
Do snakes sleep a lot?
This isn’t really covered in the life cycle study of ours but it is good to know that they average about 16 hours of sleep a day – and tend to sleep more just after they have eaten. They are redirecting their energies to digesting their dinner.
The time of year can make a difference on the sleep time too – in winter months they tend to sleep longer, up to 20 hours a day! Can you imagine all that rest time?
What smells do snakes hate?
Snakes hate the scents of cinnamon oil, clove oil, vinegar, and ammonia. That is the main reason that people tend to put a little white vinegar around their swimming pools as a natural snake repellent.
Snakes don’t like the smell of the mixture and the fumes are also itchy on their skin.
Do snakes fart?
This is GOLDEN information to share with kids – as potty humor is universal for keeping littles entertained and engaged. Who doesn’t love a good chuckle?
Snakes DO fart: as a defense mechanism! They researched a kind of coral snake that sucks air into their “butt” and then pushes it back out to keep predators away.
You can get creative with follow up questions like: do you think that YOU could fart and scare away a bear? Why or why not?
Snake books to follow up your snake life cycle lapboard project with:
This is all about the basics of snakes. If your student seems interested, it is always a great idea to dig a little deeper! We found a few great books on Amazon that can lead you down the snake path.
Everything You Need to Know About Snakes
From speedy slithering creatures and living dragons to snakes that fly and shed skin, Everything You Need to Know About Snakes explores the fascinating world of reptiles.
Readers will discover how far a cobra can spit, a gallery of fangs, how to survive a snake attack, the life cycle of a snake, and the Titanoboa — a 50-foot-long prehistoric snake — while also learning about lizards, crocodiles, tortoises, and turtles. Packed with incredible images, fun games and quizzes, plus shocking facts on anatomy, diet, and behavior, kids will want to dip into this guide time and again.
Snakes for Kids: A Junior Scientist’s Guide to Venom, Scales, and Life in the Wild
Take an amazing journey into the wonderful world of snakes―fangs, rattles, scales, and all. Snakes for Kids is filled with fascinating facts and wild photographs that will take you close up to serpents from around the globe! Dive into their habitats and life cycles and see how their relationships with other animals create balance in the food web and help keep ecosystems healthy.
Start by learning more about some of your favorite snakes―from the King Cobra to the massive Anaconda. Discover how they move, what they eat, why they shed their skin, and plenty of other cool details. You’ll also meet a few lesser-known snakes, like the strange family of blind snakes that tunnel underground. Learn everything there is to know about these mysterious reptiles and become an expert on our slithering friends.
Let’s not forget the kid’s classic: The Greedy Python
In this humorous story about manners, respect, and friendship, a greedy python eats every creature he comes across in the jungle. From a tiny mouse to an enormous elephant, the devoured animals eventually befriend one another in the belly of the snake, where they team up and kick the inside of the python until he spits them out. Rather than learning his lesson, the python sticks to his greedy ways. When he spots his own tail and mistakes it for food, he swallows himself and…disappears!
That is enough about snakes let’s get that lapboard going!
The first think you need to do is to print off our FREE pages for the project:
How to build your Snake Life Cycle Lapbook
Start by coloring out the different parts of the printable, cutting them out, and then gluing them on so you are creating your cover.
Use what ever color combination you want – but you have the basic life cycle diagram right on the cover!
Then it is time to assemble the inside of your Snake Life Cycle Lapbook
This is where everything else will go. Your mini flipbooks and all of your educational research.
You can see the flipbooks and how they let you pack more information into the limited amount of space:
THAT is what makes Lapbooks so fantastic! Their handy dandy compact size means you can easily store them in a crate or drawer of a filing cabinet – I just LOVE these!
So, what are you waiting for? Dig into my Snake Life Cycle Lapbook project and start learning more about this amazing woman and all she accomplished despite being a woman in a time when women weren’t supposed to be smart.
In case you missed it – get your copy of our FREE Printable Snake Life Cycle Lapbook project here:
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