Exploring Fruits for Toddlers

Vito is 23 months old. 

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After, the zoo, farm animals and parts of the body, I decided to do a fruit unit for this little boy as he loves to name fruits whenever we are in the supermarket.  I like to come up with themed activities as it helps the child to expand their knowledge of certain objects and occasions, practice communication skills and improve their vocabulary.

 

Beginning Sounds. We’re using Hape Lowercase Puzzle.

Apple Prints. Color recognition and sensorial activity.

Bagging Fruits. A practical life activity that develops hand/eye coordination, concentration plus helping Mommy tidy up!  We’re using Learning Resources Fruit Counters.

Matching Real Objects with Pictures. Developing early discrimination skills (difference between objects), hand/eye coordination and concentration.  I made the fruit cards and you can get a copy from here or here.

Fruit Color Sorting using a Tong. Improving fine motor skills, pincer grasp, concentration and color recognition.

I love this tong from Ikea. 

As of the moment, our color sorting activity involves two colors, but I introduce one (new) color at a time.

He’s seriously concentrating.  Goodness!

Slicing a Banana. I was with him the whole time he’s doing this, reason why I don’t have an actual photo of the activity.  Another great practical life activity to introduce to kids.  This is an introductory activity of actual “slicing”, though we’ve done a lot of this using playdough.  He still has difficulty coordinating his hands.  We’ll get there though… need to practice more

And that’s about it! Thanks once again for taking time to read through the post.  Don’t forget to PIN this for your reference.

Check me out on Pinterest for more toddler and themed activities.

Parts of an Apple and Tomato

We explored the parts of the apple and tomato after we did a couple of fruits activities.  Here’s the link for our apple crafts and fruit stamping.

A brief discussion of the life cycle of the apple tree. Got this file from Montessori For Everyone.

 

We worked the 3-part cards of the Parts of an Apple using the ones I bought from Montessori Print Shop. 

I took out samples of each parts of the apple and placed them on the cupcake cases.  After the “touch and feel”, I let my son match the pictures and labels to the control cards (not shown).

 

Same goes with the tomato. 

 

He was fascinated with the tomato.... he can’t stop touching the funiculus LOL.

So happy that I get to show him what’s the real thing... as comparison to what we have in the cards :)  It makes it more attractive and interesting to the little boy.  Hope I could do that to the rest of our nomenclatures.

 

Linking to:

The Colorful World of Fruits

This was inspired by this post from How We Montessori.

The printed materials were downloaded from At Home with Montessori.

 

This was one activity my son totally loved! What’s not in the picture was when we ate the other half of each fruit LOL.

Linking to:

The Life Cycle of Apple – Preschool Version

Here’s what we did last week, how apples came to be, and where did they come from.  We did lots of work on fruits last week due to the bad weather.  Will post the rest next :)

He did all the coloring and cutting.  I made him use the glue stick instead of a liquid glue for a change.  He loves using it, “it’s not messy Mommy” he said.

 

Below is another version of the life cycle.  Instead of a printable, we used colored cardstock to recreate the first one.  This is inspired by a pin in my Pinterest page. Sorry I forgot the link  but you can find the source there under the Spring Theme board.

Here’s what he ended up with.  He placed both works in his room :)

Linking to: