Goodnight Moon Storytelling Basket

Oh my, Goodnight Moon is one of my kids favourite books and I can’t wait to share with you the contents of our storytelling basket!  I assembled it over the weekend and both Vito and Mavi are having fun tinkering and exploring the objects. 

I read this book everynight. It’s calming, relaxing… makes them ponder of what’s out there in the night, letting them observe their room and the silence of the night.  And may I just say, there is so much love in the story.  The old lady as I would always say to the boys, is lovingly watching her little kid going to sleep, just like most Mommies do!

So this is our storybasket  where I placed all of our objects and the book. I put this on the top of the shelf. Some of the items here are small so I need to assist and supervise whenever they play with it.  Items here were from the following Playmobil playsets:

• Playmobil Dining Room
• Playmobil Children’s Bedroom
• Playmobil Master Bedroom

The clock was from Amazon, the moon is a DIY, the kittens were from Safari Toob Domestic Cats  and the bears were from Learning Resources counting bears.

Now, we’ve read this book a hundred times LOL. Vito knows this by heart.  So he knows each of the objects in the book and he was quite fascinated that he gets to see them and touch them personaly! Take a look at our three little bears sitting on chairs, the comb, brush and the bowl full of mash!

He obviously loves the bears!

But his favourite of all was the clock! Now I highly suggest that you read the book to your child first.  Give it a week of reading before starting the storytelling basket as there might be times they’ll get distracted of the toys. When that happens, just allow your child to play with it for as long as he wants.

Vito can’t take his eyes from this clock so we have to pause and explore this. We talked about the numbers and hands and he was fascinated!

I hope you like this post.  It  will give you an idea on how to put fun into your reading time.  We previously had the Papa Please Get the Moon For Me and it was also a hit!

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Australia/Oceania in a Nutshell

Finally, my Australia in a Nutshell is finally up!  It took me awhile to complete this set because of the holiday season.  I’ve been receiving a lot of requests from readers to publish this set but I’ve been too preoccupied for the past weeks. 

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I am currently printing and laminating this for our Australia Unit just in time for Australia day in January 26. 

So here are the contents of the file:

1.  Maps.  I included two maps in this file: [1] map of Australia and [2] map of Oceania.

2. 3 Part Cards of the Australian States.

3.  Country Fact Cards of Australia and Oceania.  There are 27 fact cards provided to learn about the climate, currency, government, etc of the countries that composes Oceania.

4. Fact Cards.  Everything you needed to know about Australia and other countries in Oceania is provided in these 56 fact cards. Mavi loves to read this and learn about the people and their culture in different continents.  I bet your kids will love this too! 

5.  Platypus and Frilled Lizard Nomenclature Cards. I always include these in my Nutshell series as they are my kids favourite (when Mavi was younger).  Kids love to learn about animals especially those that only thrives in a specific continent/country.

 

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Letter ‘t’ Sound Activities

 

Vito’s activities last week revolves around the letter ‘t’.  As you all know, we’re working with letter sounds for a while and funny how he’s able to name alphabets using their sounds these days instead of their names LOL.    The unit is not just actually a week’s work, but it took us 2 weeks TO get over with the materials and activities, because Vito kept using them! Let me share with you activities we did to explore and learn objects with the letter ‘t’ sound.

Lettet T Object Basket.  Let’s start with our object basket.  I filled it with 3-4 objects starting with letter t that Vito uses a  lot at home like torch, telescope/binoculars, teeth and Titanic LEGO made by Mavi.  Then added a few letters like this foam letter from Munchkins (Vito used to bite these!) and the all time favourite letters from Hape.

Train Shape Cards.  I made these! I’m so happy on how it turned out.  The train plus the DIY air dry clay shapes are currently Vito’s favourite activity. He loves matching the shapes to that in the train! 

That’s his brother’s sleep mask (from Emirates), which is his favorite accessory as of the moment.

Color Sorting using Transport Counters.  The counters are from Learning Resources and this is one of our favourites!  The train cards are DIY: using a train coloring image, I printed it in different colors of cardstock and laminated it. 

He worked on them but doesn’t stay long. As I previously said, color sorting is NOT his favourite thing as of the moment.  But even so, I still would introduce different kinds of color activities just in case he might find his interest.

Counting.  Vito loves to count, it’s like effortless in my part to make him count and identify numbers.  He counts on his own and is always giddy whenever he sees numbers.  So this turtle activity is his favourite.  We just don’t have enough turtle figures to count up to 10 LOL.  The turtle counters are from Safari Toob.  We previously worked on trees as well for our letter t unit. Check it out here

Brushing of Teeth Teeth.  Our model of mouth/teeth is just so awesome! Vito is fascinated with this and loves brushing it with his toothbrush LOL.  This is a wonderful practical life activity, especially to those little ones who are hesitant to brush their teeth   Know where you can get these teeth model here.

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Continent Study of South America

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Map and Flags. Whenever we worked a geography lesson at home(for elementary only!), I always start with maps and flags because I wanted him to memorize the location and flags of certain cities from that continent.  We travel a lot, crossing countries and continents almost every year and so knowing all these is really important.  The Montessori Continent Puzzle is from Tower High Learning.

Pinning flags in the map is an activity Mavi loves since we started geography year ago.   I printed the map from Super Teacher and used our pin maps from South American Flags (pin maps, 3 part cards, mini flags and all).

Landmarks.  We identified the famous landmarks of South America and their location on the map.  I also showed Mavi some photos of my Dad (Mavi’s grandfather) in Brazil when he visited Christ  the Redeemer.  Mavi was fascinated that his grandfather reached South America during his travels!

Galapagos Islands and its animals.  Using the Safari Toobs Galapagos, we talked about the unique animals that inhabit the islands.  I created identification cards (as reading materials for Mavi) so he will learn what makes those animals unique.

 

Animals and their Habitats. I love talking about animals and their habitats. My Mavi has always been fascinated with at different animals living in each continent. To start off, we review the different animals living in South America, these cards are from my South American Animals.  There’s so much information from these cards, like it indicates the class of the animal (mammal, reptile, bird etc), the habitat in which they thrive and the kind of foods they eat.  We also matched them with our animal figures from Safari Toob Rainforest.

We also talked about the colourful animal coverings and patterns of the South American animals and compared them to those in Africa.  Just by looking at the animals’ coverings, you will know in which habitat they thrive.  Most colourful animals like that of Macaw birds and poisonous frogs lives in rainforests, while those that are grayish, thrives in deserts.

Because we looked into the animals of South America, we examined the green iguana which mostly lives in that continent.  We haven’t worked on reptiles before, so this was a good start of learning the different parts of a reptile and differentiate it from birds,  fish, frogs and mammals.

Plants.  Talking about habitats led us to discuss plants of South America.  These plants mostly grow in the tropical areas of the continent and the cold mountains of Andes.  These cards are from the Plant Atlas.

 

Culture.  I’ve collected important fact about South America and included it in our learning  cards for our South America in a Nutshell.  These cards are for older children who love to read and learn about the culture, lifestyle and religion of the people of South America.

The cards provide information how people dress up, what foods they eat, the products they export to other countries and the richness of each South American countries. 

Because South America has brought us dances like Tango and Samba, Mavi and I watched a few videos online to see how these dances are being performed.

 

We also watched the festivals celebrated in South America, like the Tango Festival and the Carnaval in Brazil.

Other materials that we used are the following:

Natural Resources of the World – information about the different natural resources found in each continent.

Animal Habitats – contains collection of animals that thrive in the different biomes of the world. 

Major Rivers of the World – pictures and facts cards of the longest and most important rivers of each continent.

Another fantastic geography lesson we had early this year was the study of Africa. Click here or the image below for ideas and list of activities

And don’t forget to pin this for later! You will definitely be needing this!

Learning materials used:

South America in a Nutshell.  More about it here.

Animals of South America

Landmarks of South America

Flags of South America

Plant Atlas

Animal Habitats

Major Rivers Around the World

Safari Toobs Rainforest

Continent Map from Tower High Learning or from Amazon

Safari Toobs Galapagos

Letter 'c' Sound Activities

This was a fun and quick set activities.  We basically finished all of these in a week.

Letter 'c' sound basket.  Our object basket was composed of a carrot, a toy red car and a cow animal figure.  The foam letter is from Munchkins Foam Bath.

Letter 'c' craft. I made Vito colour the letter c using our Do-a-Dot markers (which he really really loves by the way).  Afterwhich, I made him watch Mavi cut the letter and turn it into a letter c carrot.

C for colours.   This is again another colour matching activity I prepared for Vito.  The cups were from the local store and the cubes were from  Melissa & Doug Lacing Beads learning toy.  We do this activity everyday for Vito to know his colours.

C for cottons.  We tried this activity, painting using cotton balls but Vito was horrified of the cotton.  So we proceeded with finger painting instead.  We are using Giotto Bebe Fingerpaints at home.

Playing with pegs (pretend corns).  We played around with favourite FantaColor pegs and Vito is getting better fitting those smaller pegs into the hold

Steamed carrots.  Vito's snack for the entire week LOL.

C for cars.  We played with cars every morning and matched them to our homemade colour cards.  Read about it here.

Books this week:

• Caps for Sale
• The Carrot Seed
• BigCats Phonics From Cow to Carton Milk
• That's not my Car

You can also purchase these books from Book Depository, shipping is free!

Photos of Vito working.

More letter sound activities coming up in the next few weeks!

Thank you for taking time to read this post! Don’t forget to pin it for later.

Why not try reading our Letter ‘a’ Sound activities?

 Our Letter ‘b’ Sound activities might interest you as well!