Lapbook

Lapbook adalah map (yang bentuknya bisa dimodifikasi sesuai selera) berisi folder atau kantong yang dilipat atau dibentuk sedemikian rupa.

Didalamnya, anak bisa menempelkan buklet yang bentuknya berupa lipatan, gambar, atau folder sejenis amplop yang dibuat sendiri. Semuanya dapat merupakan grafik, diagram, gambar, atau craft yang bisa disimpan didalamnya.

Lapbook bersifat:
- menjadi cara penyaluran daya kreasi
- tempat menyimpan subyek yang harus diingat
- perangkat untuk mereview pengetahuan anak
- sebagai alat bantu bagi yang menggunakan metode unit study, charlotte mason, dan menghidupkan buku teks.
- Menyimpan proyek dengan cara yang mudah menyenangkan dan tidak mahal dalam pembuatannya
- bisa dibuat oleh anak mulai usia 3 tahun
- bisa diterapkan untuk semua jenis kurikulum

Bahan apa saja yang bisa digunakan?
- kertas putih dan berwarna
- aneka worksheet
- aneka gambar sesuai topik dari majalah, buku-buku, clipart atau foto
- lem
- double tape (saya lebih suka memakai double tape daripada lem, karena tidak perlu menunggu kering dan tampak lebih rapi)
- stempel
- crayon atau pensil warna
- gunting polos atau berpola

Bagaimana membuatnya?
Pertama, ambil satu tema yang ingin dipelajari anak. Bantu anak untuk membuat mapnya, misalnya dengan 3 karton berwarna ukuran A4/folio yang disatukan dengan selotip. Lalu tanya pada anak apa saja yang mau dia letakkan di bukunya, kalau anak tidak punya ide bantulah dengan memberikan gambaran apa saja yang bisa diletakkan.

Membuat folder file bisa dengan aneka bentuk, misalnya bentuk amplop, lipat-lipat seperti membuat origami kipas, atau sekedar kertas yang ditempel untuk selipan. Folder bisa diisi dengan berbagai gambar, huruf atau angka, daun atau bunga kering, benih yang sudah dikeringkan, atau apapun sesuai temanya.

Isi tulisan pun bisa beragam, mulai dari gambar sequential, diagram, grafik, cerita singkat, atau hanya gambar biasa untuk melatih keterampilan menggambar.

Untuk anak yang masih dbawah 6 tahun, membuat lapbook juga melatih kemampuan motorik kasar dan halusnya, selain juga melatih anak untuk konsentrasi, asalkan semua dilakukan anak dengan senang. Orangtua dalam hal ini hanya menganjurkan ide dan membantu apa yang anak belum bisa, misalnya membuat pola folder. Untuk menentukan tema serahkan sepenuhnya pada anak. Berbagai sumber gambar atau ide craft bisa ditemukan di internet.

Tidak susah membuatnya, hanya dibutuhkan kesabaran dan ide. Membuat lapbook bersama anak adalah pengalaman yang sangat menyenangkan, sambil menyusunnya anak bisa belajar berbagai hal dalam selubung tema yang dia pilih. Lapbook juga bisa melatih kerjasama dengan temannya jika dibuat bersama-sama teman.

Memang banyak sekali ide tentang lapbook di internet, untuk latihan awal ide tersebut bisa diambil, lalu untuk berikutnya cobalah membuat berdasarkan ide dan kreatifitas sendiri. Untuk awalnya tidak perlu tampak indah, karena lapbook yang baik adalah yang original, mencerminkan kemampuan anak, dan bisa menunjang proses belajar anak.

Lego

Early history

The Lego Group had a very humble beginning in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark. Christiansen began creating wooden toys in 1932; the company began calling itself "Lego" two years later in 1934. The company expanded to producing plastic toys in 1940. In 1949, Lego began producing the now-famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based largely on the design of Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were released in the UK in 1947. The first Lego bricks, manufactured from cellulose acetate, were developed in the spirit of traditional wooden blocks that could be stacked upon one another; however, these plastic bricks could be "locked" together. They had several round "studs" on top, and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they could not be pulled apart.

The company name Lego was coined by Christiansen from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well". The name could also be interpreted as "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin, though this would be a somewhat forced application of the general sense "I collect; I gather; I learn"; the word is most used in the derived sense, "I read". The cognate Greekverb "λέγω" or "lego" also means "gather, pick up", but this can include constructing a stone wall.

The Lego Group's motto is "Only the best is good enough", translated from the Danish phrase, Det bedste er ikke for godt. This motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. The motto is still used within the company today.

The use of plastic for toy manufacture was not highly regarded by retailers and consumers of the time. Many of the Lego Group's shipments were returned, following poor sales; it was thought that plastic toys could never replace wooden ones.

By 1954, Christiansen's son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that struck the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint: their "locking" ability was limited, and they were not very versatile. It was not until 1958 that the modern-day brick design was developed, and it took another five years to find exactly the right material for it. The modern Lego brick was patented on January 28, 1958, and bricks from that year are still compatible with current bricks.

Design and manufacture

A Lego City.

Lego pieces of all varieties have been, first and foremost, part of a universal system. Despite tremendous variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1963 still interlock with those made in 2008, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.

Bricks, beams, axles, mini figures, and all other elements in the Lego system are manufactured to an exacting degree of tolerance. When snapped together, pieces must have just the right amount of "clutch power"; they must stay together until pulled apart. They cannot be too easy to pull apart, or the resulting constructions would be unstable; they also cannot be too difficult to pull apart, since the disassembly of one creation in order to build another is part of the Lego appeal. In order for pieces to have just the right "clutch power", Lego elements are manufactured within a tolerance of 2 µm.

Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from a strong, resilient plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS. Precision-machined, small-capacity molds are used, and human inspectors check the output of the molds, to eliminate significant variations in color or thickness. Worn-out molds are encased in the foundations of buildings to prevent their falling into competitors' hands. According to the Lego Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the standard required. Only one percent of the plastic waste in Lego factories goes unrecycled.

Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Molding is done at one of two plants in Denmark and Czech Republic. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, United States, Mexico and the Czech Republic. Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 20 billion (2×10¹⁰) per year, or about 6000 pieces per second. To put this in context, if all the Lego bricks ever produced were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62 Lego bricks.

In 2007, Lego Group announced a restructuring of the current production setup including the outsourcing of some of the production work to Flextronics, a Singaporean electronics company. Lego Group plans to close the production facility in Enfield, Connecticut and outsource this work to the Flextronics factory in Mexico. Flextronics will also oversee the factory in Kladno, Czech Republic. The Czech facilities would also be expanded due to the planned closing of the Swiss factory in Baar, which mostly manufactured TECHNIC parts.

Today

Since it began producing plastic bricks, the Lego Group has released thousands of play sets themed around a variety of topics. Examples include, but are not limited to, space, robots, pirates, vikings, ninjas, medieval castles, dinosaurs, holiday locations, the wild-west, the Arctic, airports, miners, Star Wars, SpongeBob SquarePants, Harry Potter and Exo-Force. New elements are often released along with new sets. There are also Lego sets designed to appeal to young girls such as the Clikits line which consists of small interlocking parts that are meant to encourage creativity and arts and crafts, much like regular Lego bricks. Clikit pieces can interlock with regular Lego bricks as decorative elements.

The Lego range has expanded to encompass accessory motors, gears, lights, sensors, and cameras designed to be used with Lego components. There are even special bricks, like the Lego NDT that can be programmed with a PC or a Mac to perform very complicated and useful tasks. These programmable bricks are sold under the name Lego Mindstorms.

In 2006 a new Lego Mindstorms kit called Mindstorms NXT was released. It is more advanced than the RCX, has a bigger screen than the RCX, and has a new array of sensors. They include touch, sound, light, and a new ultrasonic sensor technology. There is also a Bluetooth compatible hookup that can send and receive messages from one's cellphone and other Bluetooth compatible devices. The RCX was only compatible with Windows, but NXT is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS.

There are several robotics competitions which use Lego bricks and the RCX. The earliest, and likely the largest, is Botball, a national U.S. middle- and high-school competition stemming from the MIT 6.270 Lego robotics tournament. A related competition is FIRST Lego League for elementary and middle schools. The international RoboCup Junior soccer competition involves extensive use of Lego Mindstorms equipment which is often pushed to its extreme limits.

Bionicle is a line of toys by the Lego Group that is marketed towards those in the 7–16-year-old age range. The line was launched in January 2001 in Europe and June/July 2001 in the United States. The Bionicle idea originated from the earlier toy lines Slizers (also known as Throwbots) and Roboriders. Both of these lines had similar throwing disks and characters based on classical elements. The sets in the Bionicle line have increased in size and flexibility through the years.

Lego Group operates four Legoland amusement parks, three in Europe and one in California. On July 13, 2005, the control of 70% of the Legoland parks was sold for $460 million to the Blackstone Group of New York while the remaining 30% is still held by the Lego Group. There are also several Lego Brand retail stores, including at Downtown Disney in both the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts and in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. As of year end 2005, there are 25 Lego Brand Retail stores in the USA, a number of stores in Europe, and a franchised Lego store in Abu Dhabi.

Lego has also successfully branched into video games that appeal to a wide age range, with titles like Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, Bionicle Heroes as well as the Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, the upcoming Lego Universe MMOG, Lego Batman, and Lego Indiana Jones.

Further information: Minifigures

Lego Digital Designer, is a Lego software for Windows and Mac OSX which allows users to build with Lego bricks on their computers. Users can then publish their creations online on the Lego Factory website.

On January 28, 2008, Lego celebrated the 50th anniversary of the patent on its interlocking blocks with a worldwide building contest. Google paid tribute to the anniversary by writing its name on the Google homepage in Lego bricks, along with the Lego figure on one of the letters.

Sumber: Wikipedia

Kumbang

Beetles are a group of insects which have the largest number of species. They are placed in the order Coleoptera, which means "sheathed wing" and contains more described species than in any other order in the animal kingdom, constituting about twenty-five percent of all known life-forms. Forty percent of all described insect species are beetles (about 350,000 species), and new species are frequently discovered. Estimates put the total number of species, described and undescribed, at between 5 and 8 million.

Beetles can be found in almost all habitats, but are not known to occur in the sea or in the polar. They interact with their ecosystems in several ways. They often feed on plants and fungi, break down animal and plant debris, and eat other invertebrates. Some species are prey of various animals including birds and mammals. Certain species are agricultural pests, such as the Colorado potato beetle Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the boll weevil Anthonomus grandis, the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, and the mungbean or cowpea beetle Callosobruchus maculatus, while other species of beetles are important controls of agricultural pests. For example, coccinellidae ("ladybirds" or "ladybugs") consume aphids, scale insects, thrips, and other plant-sucking insects that damage crops.

Description

The name "Coleoptera" was given by Aristotle for the hardened shield-like forewings (coleo = shield + ptera = wing).

Other characters of this group which are believed to be monophyletic include a holometabolous life cycle; having a prothorax that is distinct from and freely articulating with the mesothorax; the meso- and meta-thoracic segments fusing to form a pterothorax; a depressed body shape with the legs on the ventral surface; the coxae of legs recessed into cavities formed by heavily sclerotized thoracic sclerites; the abdominal sternites more sclerotized than the tergites; antennae with 11 or fewer segments; and terminal genitalic appendages retracted into the abdomen and invisible at rest.

The general anatomy of beetles is quite uniform, although specific organs and appendages may vary greatly in appearance and function between the many families in the order. Like all insects, beetles' bodies are divided into three sections: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. When viewed from below, the thorax is that part from which all three pairs of legs and both pairs of wings arise. The abdomen is everything posterior to the thorax. When viewed from above, most beetles appear to have three clear sections, but this is deceptive: on the beetle's upper surface, the middle "section" is a hard plate called the pronotum, which is only the front part of the thorax; the back part of the thorax is concealed by the beetle's wings. Like all arthropods, beetles are segmented organisms, and all three of the major sections of the body are themselves composed of several further segments, although these are not always readily discernible. This further segmentation is usually best seen on the abdomen.

Beetles are generally characterised by a particularly hard exoskeleton and hard forewings (elytra). The beetle's exoskeleton is made up of numerous plates called sclerites, separated by thin sutures. This design creates the armoured defences of the beetle while maintaining flexibility. The elytra are not used for flight, but tend to cover the hind part of the body and protect the second pair of wings (alae). The elytra must be raised in order to move the hind flight wings. A beetle's flight wings are crossed with veins and are folded after landing, often along these veins, and are stored below the elytra.

In some beetles, the ability to fly has been lost. These include the ground beetles (family Carabidae) and some "true weevils" (family Curculionidae), but also some desert and cave-dwelling species of other families. Many of these species have the two elytra fused together, forming a solid shield over the abdomen. In a few families, both the ability to fly and the elytra have been lost, with the best known example being the glow-worms of the family Phengodidae, in which the females are larviform throughout their lives.

Beetles have mouthparts similar to those of grasshoppers. Of these parts, the most commonly known are probably the mandibles, which appear as large pincers on the front of some beetles. The mandibles are a pair of hard, often tooth-like structures that move horizontally to grasp, crush, or cut food or enemies. Two pairs of finger-like appendages are found around the mouth in most beetles, serving to move food into the mouth. These are the maxillary and labial palpi.

The eyes are compound and may display remarkable adaptability, as in the case of whirligig beetles (family Gyrinidae), in which the eyes are split to allow a view both above and below the waterline. Other species also have divided eyes — some longhorn beetles (family Cerambycidae) and weevils — while many beetles have eyes that are notched to some degree. A few beetle genera also possess ocelli, which are small, simple eyes usually situated farther back on the head (on the vertex).

Beetles' antennae are primarily organs of smell, but may also be used to feel out a beetle's environment physically. They may also be used in some families during mating, or among a few beetles for defence. Antennae vary greatly in form within the Coleoptera, but are often similar within any given family. In some cases, males and females of the same species will have different antennal forms. Antennae may be clavate (flabellate and lamellate are sub-forms of clavate, or clubbed antennae), filiform, geniculate, moniliform, pectinate, or serrate.

The legs, which are multi-segmented, end in two to five small segments called tarsi. Like many other insect orders beetles bear claws, usually one pair, on the end of the last tarsal segment of each leg. While most beetles use their legs for walking, legs may be variously modified and adapted for other uses. Among aquatic families — Dytiscidae, Haliplidae, many species of Hydrophilidae and others — the legs, most notably the last pair, are modified for swimming and often bear rows of long hairs to aid this purpose. Other beetles have fossorial legs that are widened and often spined for digging. Species with such adaptations are found among the scarabs, ground beetles, and clown beetles (family Histeridae). The hind legs of some beetles, such as flea beetles (within Chrysomelidae) and flea weevils (within Curculionidae), are enlarged and designed for jumping.

Oxygen is obtained via a tracheal system. Air enters a series of tubes along the body through openings called spiracles, and is then taken into increasingly finer fibres. Pumping movements of the body force the air through the system.

Beetles have haemolymph instead of blood, and the open circulatory system of the beetle is powered by a tube-like heart attached to the top inside of the thorax.