Template Blog Test: Vito

Showing posts with label Vito. Show all posts

The Rainbow Clouds Craft

Wednesday, 9 March 2016

I saw this beautiful rainbow craft a few weeks ago in Pinterest and I totally forgot the main site, so please if you own this craft leave a message and I’ll include the credits.

I’ve been introducing Vito to the spring season using our Spring Season Picture Cards, books and outdoor activities. Today, I’m sharing the rainbow clouds the boys made last week. The weather was terrible at that time and we couldn’t explore our yard so I made use of their free time doing crafts at home. So I tried to scan through Pinterest in search of simple crafts that BOTH of my kids could work on, and this is one of them!

Crafts projects allow children to exercise their fine motor skills, improve manual dexterity and understanding of visual-spatial relationships. They provide opportunities to use their imagination as well. Just be vigilant when using small items and sharp objects like scissors.

Materials:

Procedure:

1. Pre-cut the white cardstock into a cloud shape. I made one for each of the boys. Apply glue on the clouds, and I suggest you provide each kid a glue as they tend to fight over one object when working. In our case, I just instructed them of what to do, and they’re the ones who executed it. Mostly, Vito follows what his brother is doing Open-mouthed smile

2. Place a generous amount of cotton. The fluffiness of the cotton bothers Vito though and he tried to avoid touching the glue as well.

3. Apply glue at the bottom side of the cloud for your rainbow. Place accordingly the strips of coloured cardstock to form a rainbow. You can demonstrate this to the kids or instruct them of the order of colours if they are not yet familiar with rainbow.

4. Strike a pose when they are dry! See how Vito refuses to strike a pose in the camera LOL. See what happens when your toddler is camera shy.

5. And don’t forget to put them on display. They look adorable as wall decors and kids love looking at their masterpieces! The cherry blossom was another project that we made earlier last month and will post the details soon.

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Exploring the Bucket Balance

Saturday, 5 March 2016

Vito is 27 months old.

I have this bucket balance years ago and was mostly used by Mavi. He’s been using it to learn concepts like mass units and the concept of gravity. I’m so hesitant to let Vito use it for the obvious reason that at his age, he might break it or doesn’t know how to use it. But I was wrong! One day, I ran out of ideas for him so I bravely took our bucket balance and a bunch of Duplos for him to explore. Well, lo and behold! It was a total hit and didn’t expect that he’ll enjoy using it!

So what did Vito exactly do with the balance and what are the things he discovered?

First, it goes up and down! This was the first thing he learned! Up and down, up and down he keeps on saying it as he manipulates the scale by placing Duplos in the bucket.

See his smile?

Then he realized he can control it as well by moving the center hold. So he’s ignoring the weights (Duplos) but controlling the balance by moving the center to left and right, thus making the scale goes up or down.

Next, he discovered that there’s a mini drawer where he can open and close. So we practiced it, open and close saying those words all together to learn the concept.

He started putting in some objects (weight) to see what will happen. And he closes it and said “hide”.

Vito kept playing with this for the next 30 minutes, and we varied the number of Duplos in each bucket to see the effects.

I honestly didn’t know that this old learning material of Mavi can have a big effect on Vito. It’s currently one of his favourite “toy” and we kept on using it as a tool in play pretend. This is such an amazing tool for introducing early concepts of math, science and simple machines! This Learning Resources Bucket Balance if you have the chance can also be a wonderful gift for birthdays and Christmas. I’m happy that both of my boys have benefited from this!

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The Use of Funnel for Toddlers

Tuesday, 1 March 2016

Vito is 28 months old.

I recently introduced the use of funnel to Vito and boy oh boy, it’s non stop play!

The addition of funnel in our beans and water transfer has added an extra spice in Vito’s daily activity. He’s been doing activities like pouring and scooping for quite sometime now and let’s say he’s getting tired of it. So to explore the other capabilities of pouring, I added funnel in his activity tray.

Benefits of using funnel or tubing:

the difference between wide and small mouthed containers. Make sure that the bottle is clear so the child can see the flow for the elements.
from one step water transfer to pour-funnel-pour procedure (additional step)
learn the concept of water flow

Children are fascinated with water and by making the flow. The use of funnel is one of these elements that can help children understand about small spaces and how the flow of water works. They will discover that to easily transfer water to a small mouthed container, they’ll be needing a tubing or funnel to successfully pour elements into it.

To demonstrate here’s a video of Vito transferring lentils and water using a funnel.

Your kids will definitely have fun with this one, mine can’t stop playing! Hope that this will work on you!

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St. Patrick’s Day Activities for 28 Months Toddler

Sunday, 28 February 2016

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Vito is 28 months old.

St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner and we are excited to watch the parade in the city this year! To introduce Ireland’s big celebration to Vito, I prepared a bunch of work trays for him this month as he turns 28 months old. I featured 9 activities here but in reality we’re doing so much more, so I’ll just update the blog of other activities that are not included here.

1. Ireland Matching Cards. These cards are similar to the picture books that I have already in the shop. The cards here are all about the icons of Ireland.

2. Sorting Erasers. Owned this since last year and it is just now that Vito enjoys sorting it. You can get the erasers from here.

3. Sorting Colors. Using the Montessori Colour Tablets #2, Vito will be sorting the rainbow colors using our Learning Resources counters. In the picture we’re using the insect counters, he likes them!

4. Letter R and Round Magnets. This Rainbow Do a Dot was printed from here and I saw this from Deb’s page. It’s a good practice of hand eye coordination. Vito makes sure he places the round magnets exactly into the dots.

5. Creating a rainbow using Do a Dot Markers. Similar to the Rainbow do a dot but this time we’re using the markers. I showed Vito how to color the rainbow and he finished half of the page. And no, he didn’t follow the order of the rainbow colors (as expected). You can get the rainbow pattern from Making Learning Fun.

6. Pouring lentils using a funnel. Out of all the activiites, this one is Vito’s favourite. More on this later.

7. Scooping lentils. He’s quite bored with scooping activities lately, I guess its because we’ve been doing it all throughout the week. And besides, he enjoys using his hands more than using a scoop or spoon.

8. Counting gold coins. I bought the gold coins in Amazon for our Pirate Unit last year, and this time Vito gets to use it for St. Patrick’s Day. We have more counting activities than letters because believe it or not, Vito is more interested in counting than letters.

9. Patterning. This is for colour recognition and introduction to patterning. We are using the link cubes I bought from Singapore years ago, but you can also purchase this in Amazon. This March, we’re working on orange and green colors, so our color activities will revolve around this two.

10. One to one correspondence using clothes pins. A new addition to our monthly work trays is this counting cards and clothes pins. We have lots of pins at home but found them difficult to open, so I bought the wooden ones for Vito to practice on. He’s able to open and close it, and now his biggest challenge is to clip it on the picture. This activity is counting practice and enhancement of hand-eye coordination skills.

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Learning about Faces!

Tuesday, 23 February 2016

The boys (and I) had so much fun making faces! This is a simple activity that you can do with your kids with minimal preparation. It’s the perfect opportunity to learn about emotions and the facial expressions they can make!

I printed and laminated this My Face template from Twinkl and each boy has one so they draw their faces on it using dry erase pens. Vito was telling me he’s making a spider!

Another option is to use playdough to create faces! You can get your kids practise their fine motor skills by letting them use some cutters and moulders.

Matching cards is always part of our activities because Vito is obsessed with it. I printed this faces printable from Natural Beach Living.

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Small World Play: Giant Pandas

Friday, 19 February 2016

Early this year, when everything in Amazon was on sale, I got this one of a kind Panda and the Bamboo Forest Playset from Playmobil. I’ve been eyeing this for months since last year and I was lucky enough to chance this set on sale! Giant Pandas are one of those animals that are in the endangered list and I think somehow, by having this playset at home I can introduce this beautiful animal to the kids, talk about their characters and habitat.h

PS. We’ve visited a lot of zoo, but we haven’t encountered a Giant Panda. We didn’t chance upon them in Singapore Zoo either.

We love the the Panda Playset! The bamboo, tree, hilltop and bridge plus the panda family! It’s a perfect playset for our little pandas to play with their Moms and Dads. In setting up the tray, I added a felt craft paper (grass) and a few more figures from Safari Toob to create a community of pandas. Mavi assembled everything in this Melissa and Doug wooden tray. Note that the Playmobil pandas are much bigger than the Safari Toobs’.

The boys love the bamboo objects included in the playset. We talked about what pandas eat and in what environment they thrive. We also discuss about bamboos and where we can find these.

Vito loves the small cave in the playset. He “hides” the pandas there as he counts them.

Day and night, this is Vito’s favourite play material. He plays with this in the morning while I’m busy preparing Mavi for school. Just make sure to keep an eye on those baby pandas, they’re quite small and toddlers tend to put them in the mouth or throw them anywhere in the house.

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March Activities and {Learn & Play Link Up}

Thursday, 18 February 2016

March is fast approaching and I’ve been doing some planning for the boy’s activities for next month. I am also looking forward for a warm weather so we can do outdoor play and exploration. For this week’s featured activities, let me share Vito’s first “themed” unit:

We had a lot of fun with these, especially the scooping of pompoms and the paint works!

Now, for this week’s featured posts, I am sharing the activities that you can do for the month of March!

Study of Ancient China

Tuesday, 16 February 2016

Few weeks ago, Mavi and I were learning about Ancient China. I decided that this year, we’ll be focusing in country-based studies rather than continents. Last month we worked on Australia, and because of Chinese New Year being celebrated during February, I guess this month is the best time to conduct Chinese-themed activities.

To start with, we created a small world play tray with Ancient China objects on it. To know more about this, click the image below or here.

Then we worked on learning about the location, biomes, lifestyle and culture of the people of China. We used our China Picture Book and Cards in these activities. I printed the Asia Map from here and the fact cards were from our Asia in a Nutshell. Here you can learn about the way of life of the Chinese people and their religion.

This picture book is Mavi’s current favourite obsession. He reads it, enjoying his discoveries about China and love working on the coloring/writing pages. So funny that Vito saw Mavi working on the cards that he couldn’t resist matching the cards to that of the outline pages!

My 2 year-old toddler loves the cards! He matched the control cards to the outline pages.

They’ve been practising how to write Chinese characters in school. He’s good (But I coulnd’t understand what he wrote in the cards LOL)!

Lastly, we made Chinese lanterns on the eve of Chinese New Year. The boys had fun making the lanterns and observing the lights. We used this Hands-on HIstory Ancient Chinese book from the library for our arts and crafts. I highly recommend this book!

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