Life Cycle: Natural Environment I

The last part of the Life Cycle series is the study of the natural environment, distinguishing land and water environments and its living organisms.  The study of the natural environment is broken into two parts:  habitats and food chains.  This post is all about the organism’s habitats.

The two major environments that we talked about are those organisms that live on land and those that live in the marine environment (water). To illustrate this, I took out two containers, the first one is filled with water and the other with oatmeal that represents land.  Here Mavi sorts out the animal figures, for water and land animals.

Points to discuss here:

• difference between land and water animals ex: animals with feet and fins
• land have trees and grasses while marine animals enjoy seaweeds
• land is dry with extreme temperatures while marine environment does not have extreme temperatures

As we talked about the land environments, we revisit our study of habitats.  The land environment have forests, deserts and grasslands.

You can get the Animal Habitat Cards here.  Using our definition cards, we talked about the weather conditions of each habitat, how the animals survive or cope up with their environment, what they eat and also discuss plants that grows on each habitat.

Mavi also tried to recreate the habitats, inspired by sensory bins.

 

 

The marine environment on the other hand can be shallow and deep salt water.

Download your FREE Marine Animals and Ecosystem here.

Though we cannot recreate the marine environment, we will have a few trips in the seaside for this next for a hands-on learning (since we’re going to a tropical country!). 

During the course of the lesson, I emphasized the meaning of the following words for vocabulary and let Mavi to practice writing it on a paper:

• marine
• environment
• habitat
• organisms
• natural

Next week, we’ll talk about food chains.  This would be the first time I’ll introduce the subject to Mavi so this would be interesting as well. We’ll be using our animal figures to illustrate chains and food webs :D Can’t wait!

More Science activities here: Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Science on Pinterest.

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Decoding the Cuneiform Writings

 

Mavi loves this activity!  We’ve just finished Chapter 3:  The First Writing of SOTW and we’ve been doing this “decode the message” activity game the whole day.  Hopefully this will lead us to decode binary numbers and ASCII in the days to come LOL.

Picture below shows my son attempting to make his own code as well.  Oh I can’t wait to make another one tomorrow for him to work on!

The Twister Experiment

I am currently on vacation mode, so I am not keeping up with my planned schedule.  It’s the midterm break for Mavi and I don’t want to put too much “home” school activities for him as well. So we’re taking each day slowly, whip any activity I can think of if I feel it or if Mavi asks for it.  But other than that, we spend our time outdoors, doing a Harry Potter marathon and catch up on my workout as well.

As I mentioned, we’re doing random activities as of the moment.  And that’s what we did last week.  We have a few empty water bottles and we made use of it by making a shape of a tornado!

 

Objective:  This is to demonstrate the shape of a tornado.

Materials: 

• 2 two-litres of water bottle empty
• water
• duct tape

Procedure:

Fill one bottle with half full water.  Place the second bottle upside down on top of the half filled bottled water.  Secure them with a duct tape.  Turn the bottle upside down so that the bottle with water is on top (make sure to  stand the bottle on the table.  Hold the lower bottle with one hand and using the other hand, quickly move the upper  bottle in a circular motion counter-clockwise.  Stand the bottles upright with the empty bottle remaining on top.

The picture below is quite blurry, but I just want to you see the wonder on my son’s face. Precious!

Results:  The water in the upper bottle swirls in the counterclockwise direction and this forms a shape that looks like a funnel as the water pours into the other bottle.  This funnel shaped formation is the same shape as the vortex formed by a tornado.

Vocabulary:

• A vortex a spinning flow of fluid.
• A tornado is a violently rotating funnel of air that touches the ground.

Mavi enjoyed this activity!  We kept the water bottles for days and he keeps on doing those “shaky” things to make the tornado. 

For best result, it is recommended to use a washer in between the bottle’s mouth piece.

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Pumpkins!

No, we’re not carving pumpkins this Halloween. First, I don’t have the tools and second, we have no space for them.  So instead we painted pumpkins and stick them on the crystal window of my son as decors!

Teeny Weeny Tot School

 

We’re celebrating a few milestones! 

First Vito can now sit upright in his chair. I used this opportunity to make him look at books and practice turning pages to master pincer grasp :) 

And we started to wean on his own! He insisted actually. I was feeding him and wanted to take spoon from me which I did. I gave him the opportunity to feed himself and he actually did! Well he didn’t get to finish his lunch but it’s so AMAZING to see him trying to scoop the food from the his bow and put it in his mouth! He was doing it OVER and OVER until he got tired until Mommy has to do it for him :)

Sensory and weaning at the same time using a jelly!

This soft sensory blocks is not a favourite at the moment. But I do love their colours and their different textures.  For now he just keeps on mouthing them and using them as teethers  (yes these are teethers as well). 

He loves to touch it using his pointer fingers though.

More pincer grasp practice using the chunky puzzles.

 

Oh and definitely loves my homemade shakers :)

 

I’m not into sensory bins as I don’t have the space to store them but we do have lots of boxes of animal figures (Mavi’s), and whenever I need him to get busy… I just give him these boxes to explore.  He loves to take the animal figures from the box and put them just on the side.

For language, we did animal farms last week. 

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Life Cycle: Human Body Part II

The second and last part of our Human Body Study includes the Skeletal System and a brief introduction to the Permanent Teeth Development. 

The Human Bones (Skeletal System)

Previous works on Skeletal System can be found here and here.

This year, I added some depth into our study.  We started our work using the Skeletal Nomenclature Cards.  This is an independent work for him. 

 

Next, I have this small miniature of the human skeleton which I bought on a Euro Store and I started to cut it into pieces.  Here showed Mavi the bone models and compare it to our image.  We talked about the functions of each bones in the human skeleton.  We also tried to compare the arm and the leg bones.  Pointing out to Mavi that bones in the legs are longer than the arms.

                             

We played around with the bones.  Making different formations.  Mavi thought that this was funny LOL.

Forensic Anthropologist (A Play Pretend)

I buried the bits and pieces of the skeleton I previously dismantled in a bowl of oatmeal.  Here I asked Mavi to dig, brush and put the pieces of skeletons back together. “Oh, just like the dinosaurs Mommy!” he exclaimed.

  

 

And much to my surprise, this was an easy task for him.  He was able to complete the work in no time. Though he wasn’t challenged, he really liked digging the bones and scrubbing the oatmeal off.

 

The Bone Experiment

We conducted an experiment on a chicken bone. This is to demonstrate the effect of acids on bones. 

What you need:  Vinegar, chicken bone and a jar

 

After cleaning the cooked chicken bone, we place it in a jar filled with vinegar.  After 24hrs, we remove the bone from the jar and examined it, its texture and flexibility.  Mavi observed that, the bone’s flexibility increases daily (for 5 days) having a feeling of a rubber.

This is because of the loss of calcium in the bones after exposing it to vinegar which is an acid and reacts chemically with the bone.  As a result, Mavi and I discuss the importance of calcium in our body specifically in our bones.  How it gives the bones strength and firmness.  We also talked about the foods that are rich in calcium, which we need to eat in a daily basis for maintaining healthy bones.

Books

Our book from the library the Eyewitness Skeleton [aff. link] was also a great helped.  It shows the contrast of human bones and animals bones, the structure and formation.

                                  

And that concludes our Human Body study for this year.  Hope that this post will help you with your own skeleton activities.

Resources: 

• FREE Teeth Development Nomenclature Cards
• Human Skeleton Nomenclature and Definition Booklet

   

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FREE Teeth Development Nomenclature Cards

This week we will explore on how teeth grow.  I made the cards so we can look into the permanent set and discuss the functions of each.  Download the file by clicking the image below.

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board The Human Body on Pinterest.

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Color Gradient Painting

We try to have an art class every Friday as what I indicated in our October Calendar.    I bought new sets of paint last week, they’re 80% organic, non-toxic, water washable and doesn’t have the strong smell like that of Crayola.  So my son had a renew interest in painting and he’s been doing it randomly not just during Friday.

This idea was from a picture I saw in my Facebook newsfeed and I wanted to try it with Mavi, teaching him the colour progression… from light to dark or the other way around.

 

He picked the primary colours and the green. We added 3 drops of white paint each time we lighten the colours.  Son totally enjoyed this activity!  He especially loves the part wherein we changes the shade of the colour and he gets excited to see the effect. 

 

So here’s Mavi’s work and mine. I didn’t get to finish my work as I ended up assisting him in his colour mixtures.

 

As an extra work, he ended up mixing the primary colours…. to produce secondary colours so he can paint a rainbow. A few years ago we had colour mixing activities, you can pay it a visit as it became really popular and was featured in other blogs as well.

 

  

I’m so happy of his renewed interest! And with the new paints, I can allow him to do lots of art works without worrying of the strong paint smell :D

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Tally and Finger Counting Cards

I mentioned in Facebook that this activity (one to one correspondence) of numbers is one of my son’s favourite works.  Here, we used the number symbol cards, Montessori beads, counting finger cards, dot cards, number words and bear counters.

You can get the number cards, tally and finger counting cards from this post of Linton Academy.  The number dots were made by yours truly. Unfortunately, I lost the file and couldn’t retrieve it.  But this is so easy to do.  The number words were homemade as well (handwritten).

Enjoy!

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The Nile River

Continuing our World History study, we read about the people of Egypt and the richness of the Nile River.  We pinpoint the location of the river in the map and how the civilization of the Egyptians started in this great river.

After reading Chapter 2 of the SOTW, we proceeded immediately with the mini-projects it suggested. One of which is creating a model of the Nile River.  We could have done this outside, but the weather has been really terrible this week so we made use of our art crafts at home and whatever we could find to make our model as close to the description of the river.

Below in the picture, Mavi using blue crepe paper for the river forming a delta going to the Mediterranean Sea.  Here we discussed what is a “delta”.  A good review of our landform lesson.

 

He added some playdough to plant our mini trees (from our front yard) and made pyramids out of LEGO bricks.

 

I added accent to his project by painting the base with green paint to represent some lush farmlands. And this completed his Nile River Project!

Next I will be sharing our map work and the first mummies :D

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