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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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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Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.6 - 01.13)

An overdue post due to lots of work. 

Color mixing

              

With the use of medicine dropper and food coloring.  He attempted to paint a car (left picture) using the his mixes.

 

Pink Series

We’ve been doing this almost every day.  Currently we’re doing the ‘objects and moveable letters’ and ‘objects and cards’.  Next week we’ll be doing the abstract version, that’s using picture cards instead of objects.  After which we also work on the worksheets for the Pink Series: beginning and ending sounds.

Since I don’t have a printer, I just wrote these beginning and ending letters on a cardstock, covered it with a contact paper (I don’t own a laminator) and made him use a dry erase pen.  This way, we can always reuse our worksheets.

In case you want to know, here are objects for the Pink Series.

 

Math

We learned about time and how to read it.  See my post here.

Then also had Addition for our Math. The concept here is similar to that of Montessori’s Addition Strip Board but instead we used blue and red bear counters.  I plant to make another set using printed materials whenever my son progresses fromthis.

        

Painting

We do this almost everyday.  He also request for his paints until we ran out of it :(

Botany:  PLANTS AND FLOWERS

This week, we jumpstart our Plants and Flowers activities.  Read about it here.

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Learning about Flowers

 

I salvaged our dining table flowers and pull out a flower themed activities last week.

I made him dissect the flowers and I was so happy to see him in awe discovering what the flower is made up.  Using my Flower Nomenclature card, we first identified the parts using the real flower that we have.  For me, it would be easier for him to grasp the concept if we use real flowers instead of just playing around with printables.

I talked about the parts as we took each card, and the role it portrays in the whole plant system.  When we’re done exploring the parts and telling stories about it, we played the matching game using the nomenclature cards.  I am pretty amazed how he can easily match the labels even if he doesn’t know how to read it yet.

Then we did flower painting activities.  It’s been a long time since we had a painting activity and I was glad that he was more interested with it this time.   The moment I placed the paints in front of him, he knows exactly what to paint... clouds and trees!

 

I later asked him if he could paint some flowers.  He asked me to show him how to do it which I did.  A moment later, I came back to check on his work and saw this painting of a red flower.  I was speechless!  He hasn’t done any painting activity before and he came up with this! 

With this I am so inspired to teach him more... more ideas on what to paint. 

We will be doing more plants and flowers activity in the next few days and I hope it’ll be as fun and enjoyable as this.

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