Discovery of Lapbooking

I have been researching alternative projects to stretch my curriculum budget and to keep my kids interested in longer research projects. I was thrilled to discover lapbooking and notebooking! Why had I not discovered this before???
When I started homeschooling four years ago, I used The Well Trained Mind as a guide. I still love this book as a resource. However, I found that we were unable to follow such an extensive program exactly. Slowly, I morphed to using The Well Trained Mind guidelines for grammar, spelling, and math while allowing history and science to be covered by independent study (reading, art projects, nature observation, etc.) This worked very well for us. Because I garden and have animals, we thoroughly covered all aspects of biology. Since my daughter loves bugs, she would spend hours creating 'Bug-topia' (a little town made of recycled materials to which she would move bugs she found). Now, she also likes historical novels. My son developed a love of history. He read (and re-read) all our history books and then took out library books on the cultures that interested him. He also likes creating 'machines' and loves his K'nex and Lego's. They both did art and took music lessons. I later discovered that I had fallen into a Charlotte Mason type of schedule (sorta). Who knew? Being the overwhelmed mom that I am, I never did thoroughly research Charlotte Mason (it is still on my "to do" list) which is probably why I did not stumble across lapbooking before this.
I have spent the last couple weeks researching this and we have just started our first lapbooking project for science -Space. I am hoping that focusing on individual aspects of the subject will help the kids to have a stronger/longer interest so that we can go into more detail. My plan .... have DD10 and DS11 each take a planet per week to research, make a mini book, and then present findings to each other. Together we can make observations of the moon and record its' phases. Hopefully, we will still have momentum to research Red/White giants, black holes, nebula, cluster habits, etc. Meanwhile DD4 can do a Creation lapbook (plants, animals, heavenly bodies).
If this goes well, we will probably do State books next. Starting with North Carolina (current home) and Vermont (home state). I have a gazillion ideas on other subjects as well.
I have the feeling that my children will be all grown up and finished school before I have discovered all the cool things that we could do together. I am getting more organized though - quite a task for me. :)