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.

Linking this to: 

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.

Linking this to:

Update on our Pink Series

We’ve been religiously working on our pink series for the past week.  Thanks to Amy of Wonder Years for posting what I needed to know about Pink Series. 

In a nutshell here are the activities we should do:

1. Objects and Moveable Letters
2. Moveable Letters and Picture Cards – will work on this once I have a printer
3. Matching Objects and Word Cards
4. Matching Picture Cards and Word Cards – will work on this once I have a printer
5. Matching Picture Sheet and Word Cards – will work on this once we’re done with (1)
6. Word Lists
7. Sentence Cards and Picture
8. Booklets
9. Secret Words

And so far we only accomplished this:

Objects and Moveable Letters (homemade)

Objects and Word Cards

Then I added some exercises for the beginning and ending letter sounds.  I haven’t introduced the “middle” or vowel sound yet.

And then here’s a little observation.  There are times that he would place the vowel at the very end of the word.  He gets everything right except for the positioning of the vowels. 

 

Linking to:

Arctic Animals Control Cards (FREE PRINTABLE)

Wanted to share my Arctic cards which we use together with our Safari Arctic Toob. You check out this post to see it in action. If you don’t have these animal figures, you can print two copies of this file to play a matching game.  This can also be used as a 3-part nomenclature card (Montessori).  Montessori Print Shop provided a detailed instruction on how to prepare a 3-part card.

Click the image below to download the file.

Please note that this is for personal use only and not meant for file sharing or email transfer.  If you wish to share it, kindly link back to my site.

Enjoy!

Learning how to tell the TIME

My son and I had the most wonderful time learning how to reach clocks and telling the time. I was able to purchase this clock board at ELC with 50% rip-off last Christmas and I just waited for the holidays to be over so I could teach the little one how to use it.  Then I printed out a matching game from this site to go along with our lesson(printed last year).

First thing, I talked about the clock and how it’s long and short hands works, and telling him that it is that hands that tells us the time.  Then I demonstrated how we read the HOUR through the hand’s position.  He was listening intently which really surprised me.  Afterwhich, I showed him how to ‘read’ the clock using it’s hands.  So I demonstrated this by configuring the hands and telling him what time it is set on.  Halfway through, he figured it out so instead of me, telling what time it is... I would just set the hands and would ask him “What time does the clock say?” 

I guess it’s not that complicated because he got everything right.  In fact, he insisted that he can do it by himself.  So here he is, doing the manipulation of the hands and would ask me what time does it say! He’s like that these days... likes to play my role :)

These clock cut-outs were also taken from the penguin activity which I downloaded.  Here, I set up the clock and he would look for the match using the printables. 

For another matching game, I made him match the clocks to the appropriate time indicated  in the penguin card.  He only did a few cards though... might be tired already from all the drills we did previously.

              

So currently, we’re only learning the concept of the “time on the hour” .  I will introduce the minutes and seconds as he progress.  Do you have other activities you’d like to share in this area?

Linking this to:

 

Color Mixing

Our first activity for 2012!

I’ve been wanting to introduce this to Mavi for a loooonnnggg time but I’m always hesitant.  You know why?  He doesn’t have his own table and chair yet! So that’s what we gave him last Christmas.  Mind you, this is his 3RD table set. As you know, we’ve been moving countries from the past 2 years, so the first one was left in Belgrade and the second was given to my nephew in Singapore.  Thus, this is the third and hopefully the last!

Going back... I placed his table set in the kitchen since we will be dealing with water.  I bought food coloring (naturals are washable) from the grocery store and poured a few drops of primary colors on the ice tray.  I told him we’ll be mixing colors and see what colors we can come up with.  Oh boy, he was so so excited!

First I mixed blue and yellow... and he shouted “It’s green!”.  Then I asked him what happens if we mix yellow and orange(I did this while I mix the colors), and we came with orange and he shouted “It’s orange Mama!”.  We did the same with purple as well.

Then he asked if he can do color mixing on his own. He was experimenting a lot of colors!  He even came up with a grey color.

By the way, I used a medicine dropper.  So aside from teaching him all about color mixing, I was also demonstrating how to use a medicine dropper... that we can use it to transfer water from one container to another.  He struggled at first... but I kept on saying “squeeze and release” whenever he would dip it on the water.  I made him practice a few times as he was frustrated that he can’t get any water into the dropper.  Well, he was persistent so he finally figured out how it works.

  

I also made him do this... putting water drops on marks using medicine dropper.  Well, it’s his first time so he still can’t control the water coming out of the dropper.  But he loved doing this.  One time when we did this activity again, he made a car using the medicine dropper.

 

Just a note, I discovered that some food coloring can stain your hands.  I bought a  Natural food coloring for red and yellow, thus the one that stained on my son’s hands is blue color.

Happy mixing!

Welcome 2012!

Hello everyone! I’m back!

Well we haven’t resume regular homeschooling yet due to loads of work that needs to be done.  Though I have made a few plans for our curriculum but I plan to execute it next month.  For now, activities for Mavi will be random, we’ll be reusing old resources and if I’m in the mood we’ll be doing new ones.

Anyway for this year, I plan to:

1. Continue B4FIAR now that Homeschool Creations have available printables for subject units. 
2. We’ll do Geography!  Yes! I am so excited for this.  I’ve been preparing materials for quite a while now... thus I needed the time this month to finish my printables.  I plan to focus on countries we’ve been to like Singapore and Philippines for Asia :)
3. Introduce worksheets in the mid of this year.
4. Blue series and lots of reading practice.

And a whole lot more! Whatever comes into my mind... or whenever I get inspired by some homeschool blogs.

So there you go... my plans for 2012. 

Wishing everyone a happy and peaceful new year!