Homeschool Wrap-Up (11.21 – 11.25)

It’s been days of terrible weather.  My boy and I are hungry for some outdoor fun.  But I doubt it, with winter coming, it would be impossible to play ball at the backyard or go on a scavenger hunt :)  Thus, I really have to plan out homeschool activities for he’ll be staying indoors most of the time, till next year I guess.  Except, if the snow arrives and we have enough of it to play around.  It would be fun to make snowman and ice castles!

Here’s what we did last week... and earlier this week.

MATH

Mavi started to learn counting by 10s and 2s.  First we did counting by 10s.  It went good.  I made him fill each cup with ten beads and after he completed the cups, I told him that we needed to count by tens as there’s just too much to count.  I placed the number 10 card on the first cup, and when we get to the 2nd cup, I told him, "now there’s 2 tens.  2 tens make 20” and with that I instructed him to place the number 20 card on the 2nd cup.  Same goes through to the 3rd cup, I asked him how many tens do we have now.. and he said “3” and I said “3 tens is 30”.  We did it with the rest until we reached 80. 

It’s easy to demonstrate it if you group counters together rather than made them memorize the number symbol... which was the way I was taught LOL.  Same with skip counting by 2’s.  The challenge here though is that at the beginning he insisted that we counted from 1..2..3. He kept asking for the missing numbers LOL. 

Patterning is my son’s least favorite activity.  He’s showing no interest at it at all. Whenever we do this, he would timidly complete the activity so unlike with the rest.  Hopefully he’ll appreciate it in the future.  Patterns were downloaded from here.

Beginning letter sounds using clip cards and we used the Pond Printable Pack from Homeschool Creations. He loves this kind of activity... anything that has to do with letters :)

 

PRACTICAL LIFE

First time I introduced weaving activity and something that he enjoyed.  I first showed him how to do it, emphasizing on the over and under motion of my hands.

When he worked on it, I still had to instruct him weather the strips go either over or under.  But somehow he managed to finish it.  I plan to re-introduce this again next month :)

Helping Mommy in putting up our Christmas Tree.  Actually, it was more like playing around with the Christmas balls and the glittered stars and snowflakes :)

 

This orange scissor is currently his obsession.  So using scraps, I made some shapes and told him to cut it out.  He manages to cut the triangle, rectangle and square properly... but still couldn’t cut shapes with curves.

While playing with watercolors, I managed to teach him all about lines... straight lines, diagonal and curves.  But somehow he’s not just into it.

SCIENCE

Read about our frog activities here.

Rainforest Animals Control Cards (FREE PRINTABLE)

Don’t you just love Safari Toobs?  There are just plenty of thing you can do with it!  For one, my son uses it during his pretend play.  He loves to see those animals on books and would make his own world as well using those animals.  And as for me, I use it as materials for our unit studies or whenever we do phonics alphabet search or use it as objects for our pink series.

Since my son loves to play matching game, I decided to make control cards for each toobs that we own.  He was so delighted when he saw me print the cards and just couldn’t wait to start the matching game! 

I am sharing this in the same way others have shared their homeschool printables as well.  Please note that this is for personal use only and not meant for file sharing or email transfer.  If you wish to share it, kindly link back to my site.  Thank you!  And hope you’ll enjoy it :) 

Click the first image to download.

Frog Unit for Preschoolers

Since last week, we’ve working on our Frog theme.  This is the second time we did a frog unit study.

My aim here is for my son to learn basic information about frogs, widen his vocabulary, understand that like us, frogs undergo a circle of life, that they use their body parts to survive and play around.  But of course, aside from the serious stuff, my main purpose here is for my son to enjoy the activities I prepared for him and create wonderful memories together.

LIFE CYCLE OF FROG and FROG BODY PARTS

The life cycle cards were homemade and the body parts were downloaded from Montessori Print Shop for free! 

I was so happy that my son, can pay attention to such subjects.  He was eagerly listening to me while I read the life cycle of frogs and how they survive.  He kept asking questions (which I love!) and for the most part, act out the pictures of the tadpoles or frogs from the book lol. 

When his Dad got home, he demonstrated how the frog would close their eyes to swallow... and at the same time, how they catch dragonflies.  He stuck his tongue out, lick his Dad’s jacket and told him he’s eating the Daddy dragonfly :)

Frog Math

Skip counting using my frog counter cards.  I placed the cards in a straight line, and told him that I only have numbers 2,4,6,8 and 10 and we should be able to put this on the frogs by counting 2’s.  Although he got the idea of skip counting, he’s still insisted that we just should start counting by 1 or 0 lol.

Then we arranged it so we can count them up to 20 (he was the one who requested this).

I also made this frog leaping game.  It was an on the spot preparation. I told my boy that the frog is very very hungry and he has to eat the dragonfly at the end of the lily pad.  To do this, we have to roll the dice to know how many jumps the frog has to make in order to reach the dragonfly.  To make it more challenging I added a few stops in between so the frog can either skip pads or return to the starting line again.

PUZZLE/CRAFT

A friend of ours gave my son some nice coloring book and I discovered that there was a frog on it.  I made him color it using do-a-dot markers, while using his red-eye frog toy as a guide.  Then when it dried, I cut it into pieces so he can play with it like a puzzle and stick it together as a craft project.

But he requested that I should take a photo of him before he started working :)

                

And lastly, we worked on some matching game.  I got this from Montessori Print Shop again for free.  He is always excited whenever I tell him that we will be playing a matching game.  It is his favorite activity... so I might get all those matching games from the Print Shop if I don’t have time to make my own :)

Wonderful memories were created once again.

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Homeschool Wrap-Up (11.14 – 11.18)

Mavi is 38 months old.

Activities we did last week:

LANGUAGE

 

We had Bird unit this week.

Practice reading via Word Family Strips.

MATH

Learning how to use a ruler and played a bunch of measuring games.

 

Grid game using chicken grids which I downloaded from the net.  I had this for a long time and I totally forgot the link!

CVC word recognition using stamping game.

Skip counting using stamping game.

I laid out a roll of paper on the floor and made him connect the numbers :) Something to keep him busy for an hour.  Here he is figuring out how he can connect all the the numbers hehehe.  I love to see him concentrate!

My son currently undergoing a phase of being obsessed with writing numbers and letters.

SCIENCE.

We studied the life cycle of a chicken.

And the parts of the bird.

 

OTHERS

Practice coloring using do-a-dot markers.

Learning how to write words.  Can you see the word CARROT? He prefers writing in uppercase letters.

              

Creating colorful images using do-a-dot markers and kitchen towels.

I’m linking this to:

 

Word Family Strips

Aside from the Pink Series I made these word family strips. I made 3 for each phonic sounds “a-e-i-o-u”. 

At first he struggled with the concept or beginning letter sound and blending.  But with practice and his love for playing around the strips, he was able to figure out how it all worked. 

So can he read now? Yes! He was able to read them with minimal assistance from me :) Yipee! I couldn’t believe that this technique worked for him.

We still need to do Phonics Beginner Books of Progressive Learning so we can practice reading sentences and phrases.

Study of Birds

Last week my little boy got so interested with birds that I have to whip out my bird-related resources to give him a unit study of birds.  As you all know, I don’t have a printer yet and I just have to reuse old materials which I already have.

BOOKS. Each day, I TRY to read him books.  I use to schedule it in the morning, but we aren’t religious with it.  There were times he wanted to do lots of play pretend in the morning and would ask me to read him books in the afternoon, and vice versa.  Since I don’t have any access to our library yet, I just selected books which has “birds” on it for our theme last week.

 

3 PART CARDS.  We love these cards!  Oh and it’s tempting to hoard them Montessori Print Shop!  My son participated well when we did the Parts of a Bird.  To show him the parts aside from the control cards, I used our bird figures to point to him certain parts described in the cards.  He loves it!  And for a much understanding, I have to make a comparison of the bird parts and his body parts.  He understands well that he doesn’t have a tail :)  He keeps reminding me of that. 

What we normally do with nomenclature cards after discussing each part is to match the picture cards and the labels to the control cards.  My son loves matching cards that we did this activity in 3 straight days together with the Lifecycle of a Chicken.

LIFE CYCLE OF A CHICKEN.  Chicken are birds too, right?  LOL.  These cards were homemade, when I still have the time and energy to make nomenclature cards for personal use.  And then I realized that it’s eating much of my time, so rather than spending a full day of photoshoping I decided that it would be wise to purchase ready-made.

              

And he asked me where’s the part that we have to eat the chicken. LOL.

My homemade bird puzzle :)  My son wants to add a goggly eye but strangely I couldn’t find them at that time.  I found this puzzle pattern  (together with other animal patterns) in this site.  Boy, I’m so glad they’re sharing it on the web!

GRID GAME.  My son can’t get enough of this game.  We tried this game last year but he was more interested with the dice than the game itself.  But this time, I was glad that he got over with his fascination with the dice and participated well in the game.  He can identify the number of dots in the dice long before we did this, so he didn’t find it difficult at all reading the dots.  He loves putting “candies” on the chicken. 

 

SIZING. I got it from here. 

To be honest, I wanted to do more with this subject but sadly, I couldn’t provide additional resources.  So next time we revisit this, I might add the following:

1. Bird matching game.
2. Own Exotic Birds and discuss each birds, how they differ, and probably make control cards to match the object with the card.
3. Create bird’s nest for crafting.
4. Outdoor bird watching.  It rained the whole week so we were not able to bird watch.
5. Paint birds. 

But even though we miss a few activities, it was still fun theme to explore!

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