Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Last week, we looked into the life cycle of a butterfly :)

We read plenty of books before we started making our crafts.  Too bad it rained the entire week so we weren’t able to look for some caterpillars or butterflies.

Then we made the life cycle of a butterfly using cardstocks, marker pens and glitters.

              

As you can see, my son LOVES to add details :)

              

Here’s the finish product.  We used cotton balls for the eggs (and he keeps reminding me that they’re sticky so they won’t fall off the leaf).    We did the same thing for the life cycle of a ladybird.

Here, I downloaded it from Education.com (same as the grasshoppers) and made him color it.

Linking to:

Grasshoppers

We studied grasshoppers a few weeks ago and here’s a summary of the activities to go along with it:

PARTS OF A GRASSHOPPER.  Would love to have the nomenclature cards but then, I’m out of the budget :(

I put double sided tape on the boxes for Mavi to stick the labels of the body parts of the grasshopper. Then we did some grid game.  I made him circle the grasshoppers.  I wanted to reuse this print-out so I made him use a pencil instead of using a marker.

Then we discussed The life cycle of the grasshopper and did some coloring activities.

 

Linking to:

Handwriting

How do you practice handwriting?  In my case we do:

Write a story...

               

Trace numbers..

               

Lots of letter trace and copywork.

               

Observations:

1. He doesn’t write within the lines yet.  I still find it hard to explain to him WHY we needed to observe the guides (lines). This is the reason why I try to make him trace my own handwriting so he can practice using the guides.   Any techniques on this one?
2. He LOVES to write in CAPITAL letters. He keeps asking me why he should write in small letters, and I told him that books, newspapers uses small letters that’s why I’m encouraging him to do so.
3. His letter J, S and N are still written in wrong direction (looks like mirror images).  I am not sure whether this is normal for his age but I want to correct it as early as now for it would be hard to correct in the future.

Any more ideas?

Parts of a Ladybird

To conclude our ladybird unit, we studied the parts of the ladybird using nomenclature cards...

...and the felt puzzle I made.

 

Previously, we worked on some activities on the ‘life cycle of a ladybird’, read about it here.

Linking this to:

Spanish 101

We started learning Spanish last week.  Here, he’s learning numbers and colors in Spanish.  Since he knows how to read, he can easily match the labels both in English and in Spanish with the numerical number.

 

For colors, he already knows his verde, azul, amarillo and rojo.  The rest he still needs to learn them yet. So these days, we’re using Spanish whenever we talk about colors so he can get the hang of it.

I am surprise that he knows a LOT of Spanish words, thanks to Dora maybe LOL.

Life Cycle of a Ladybird

My son had been playing with his insect toys lately and since it’s summer, I decided that it was time for an insect study.  Honestly, I am terrified of insects... so it took me awhile to do something like this... because the sight of them give me the creeps.

Anyway, first on the list is the study of Ladybird. Yeah, that’s what we call them here instead of “ladybugs”.  I told my son that they’re just the same... and I made him use the word “ladybird “ for convenience. 

Here’s some of the books I borrowed from the library that is ladybird-related. 

Then I also borrowed a “bug” book and it has a few pages discussing the ladybird and it’s life cycle.  I love that it shows the detailed growth of the said bug in real pictures.

 

 

After I presented it to my boy, I printed out the Ladybug Life Cycle from Montessori Print Shop and have him color it.

I love his choice of colors! They’re all bright and vivid.

 

Oh and he wrote the labels.  I made him trace my handwriting though.

Then after that, we did some crafts for the life cycle just like what we did with the Frog.  I realized that I only took a few photos because I was busy directing and helping him out.

And here’s the end product.  Lovely isn’t it?

Continent: South America (with PRINTABLES)

Saw lots of books about South America a few weeks ago, so I decided to have it for our Continent study.

I love these books as well for they’ve got lots of pictures showing the culture, food and lifestyle of people in Brazil.  My son enjoyed reading books about children in different culture.  

And these were my favorite!  They were very specific and informative.  Suited enough for a home study of South America. 

Of course, studying a continents includes map.  Here’s my little boy, familiarizing the South America map.

And I made flag pins as well!  He’s interested in maps lately and love identifying each one.  I love the fact that he can now associate a flag to a county and on a specific location on the map.

 

I also made the landmarks.  I only made a few since this topic is not really an interest of his.

From the books above, I made a summary of South American animals.  You can download a copy of it here.

 

As we discuss each animal, I showed him a video of each so he can see how they behave and what are they like in real life.

Since I’ve got Rainforest Safari Toob, we also played matching game using my DIY control cards and the animal figures.

     

Same as the animal cards, I also made one for the plants of South America.  You can download it here.

Just before we wrap-up our study, my son matched the landmarks to its location using the flags :)

I wanted to cook some South American foods as well, but I discovered that some of our native foods (Filipino) are similar to that in South America.  So instead of showing him pictures, I might as well prepare those foods with him.

Hope you like it!