Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.23 – 01.27)

To wrap things up for the things we did last week...

Worksheets. We started doing worksheets and I feel so weird having this in our daily routine. Honestly, I think I’m the only one adjusting to this worksheet thingy. Usually we start our day with Montessori activities but now, I we do them right after worksheets or after lunch. 

Alphabets and Math worksheets.

 

Mavi doing good in tracing lines!

We also worked on pattern blocks.

     

Practice coloring skills using dot markers.

Pink Series:  objects and moveable letters.  He loooovess this!  And I am so happy that he’s beginning to read words NOT by familiarity but by blending letter sounds!

Pink Series:  pictures and word cards.  He worked on 4-sets in one sitting!

 

Pink Series:  started word strip this week. 

Before FIAR:  Corduroy.

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B4FIAR: Corduroy by Don Freeman

Our first Before FIAR unit for the year 2012 is Corduroy.  This story has been the focus of our activities since Monday aside from our daily worksheets.  Printables used in the activities below were sourced from:  Homeschool Creations and Homeschool Share.

Learning beginning and ending sounds of objects in the story.  Mavi did very well with his beginning letters ... but still fail to identify some ending sounds.

Sorting objects whether they’re furniture or not.  After this we also roam around the house to identify ‘real life’ furniture.

I introduced for the very first time the concept of less and more using our buttons (we often use these as counters).   It was a good start :)  We’ll be doing more of this as he progress then I can introduce the symbols less than and greater than.

We simply distinguish which is more and less (for now).  We did a couple of rounds and he finally got bored. It didn’t interest him that much.

Another Corduroy math-related activity was counting pennies.  Lisa has to save so she can buy Corduroy and this is exactly what we did here.  We don’t own a piggybank so I just printed this out as well.  This is an addition game, and we used our play money (coins) instead of printing the paper coins that comes with this printable pack. We pretended that I gave him money, and so is his Dad... then he needed to count the total amount of the coins we gave him and see if he can buy his favorite toy from the toy store.

Another math activity was “where’s the button” game.  He arranged the numbers in order for this activity.  I hide the game piece (button) underneath the number and made him guess what number the button is underneath.  I only printed out the ‘teens number so we can practice more of this, since he still gets confused of their names.

 

Patterning activities using printables and buttons.

We painted his favorite toy Thomas the train and asked if he could paint our house :)

Later we painted Corduroy together.

    

We placed the painting inside his room and loves how it resembles the Corduroy in his book.

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Worksheets – Alphabets

Because my printer has finally arrived, I am executing my “worksheets” plan starting this week.  Since almost everything here in Europe is expensive, I decided not to purchases any worksheets for Mavi.  Instead, I collected a bunch of pdf files from the web, printed and compiled some  selections for our daily worksheets.  We will still be doing Montessori activities, but I’d like to add worksheets to prepare Mavi for preschool this September.

Basically, after the circle time we start “schooling” with worksheets.  Then followed by Pink Series or Blue Series (Montessori Reading).  In the afternoon after we took a break, have lunch and did some free play, we would work on either B4FIAR units, themed units, outdoor activities, Geography or any other Montessori related activities. 

Anyway, here’s my worksheets for this week":

There are two categories: 

Monday and Wednesday, we’ll be working with alphabet based worksheets.  One letter for each day, and the letters are randomly selected.

Tuesday and Thursday, we’ll be working with numbers or math activities. 

Friday, we’ll be working with Progressive Phonics booklets and do some art-related activities.

Here are the contents of the alphabet’s worksheet:

• Practice coloring and tracing of a letter. I got it from here.
• Mark the picture that starts with the letter of the day. Here we used our do-a-dot markers and marked each objects starting with letter ‘t’ blue. The worksheet was downloaded from Beginning Reading for free.

         

• Here are additional worksheets which I downloaded from School Sparks.  The activities below is identifying words and picture objects that begins with letter ‘t’.  Here, the child glues the words or letters on the box.  I cut out the letters first and just made my son glue the correct answer.
  

 

• Some auditory exercises from the same source (School Sparks).

• I also added do-a-dot activities, which my son truly enjoyed the most.  This printable was downloaded from Shannon’s Totschool. She has both the uppercase and the lowercase letters.

• Letter maze or letter search.  This also came from Shannon’s Totschool website.

 

Now everything goes well, until my son asked for more letters to work on for his stamping activities.  He ended up doing letters A to J.  To save ink and paper (LOL), we might do the stamping game once a week or I will just make NOT to print extra letters :)

See him in action working the sheets.  Without the stamping of do-a-dots, he can finish the worksheets in about 30 minutes. 

I just hope I am doing this right.  He works these with me... with a little guidance such describing the activity, and giving out the instructions.  In a few weeks, I might still look for additional activities that we could worked in case he would ask for more.  But for now, I’ll settle for this as I am also pre-occupied with work. 

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Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.16 – 01.20)

Last week’s activities includes:

A unit study on Plants and Flowers

Read about our entire unit here (part 1) and here for part 2.

Practice writing and coloring using worksheets.

I was surprise how much he has improved with coloring even if we haven’t done it for quite a while now. 

Though my son is obsessive with alphabets... tracing letters is not his liking :(

And we also work on some math workbooks (this was given to me by a friend back home).

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More Plants and Flower Activities

Supplemental activities for our Plants and Flower theme:

We discussed how buds became flowers.

  

Flower puzzle and while completing it, we discussed the different parts by placing the labels on the correct parts.

This is how it looked like when he completed it.  My bad, I didn’t have any guide/control cards so I I guided him a little where to put the exact location of the stamens.  Though there’s an outline provided on the paper as his guide. 

     

Other activities include reading books and looking at different types of flowers.  Then we replicate those flowers using our art papers.  He was fascinated with the different shapes and colors of the flower.   

Practicing pincer grasp by pin pricking the flower shape.  This is his first time to do such an activity and wasn’t into it.  And he doesn’t want to prick on the outline... he’s more interested pricking on the spaces :)

With our “plant” theme... we walked around the estate and discussed the different type of plants that he sees.  And we took a sample of each part (except for the roots)... from flowers to stem. We brought it at home and identified each one juxtaposed the Plants Nomenclature card which I purchased from MPS.

See him in action doing the plant’s 3-part cards, paper crafts, coloring the parts of a plant and discussing the life cycle of a plant via a book which was given to him by hi godparents.

Well... ‘twas an activity my son truly enjoyed.  Hopefully, we can revisit this theme by Spring or Summer :)

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