AUGUST PLANS

Here are some of the few things we needed to do before the September.  My son will start school next month and is enrolled in a Montessori class.  Though he will be in school in the morning,  we still have the afternoon to do home “school” if he asks for it (he doesn’t watch TV), or when we can’t play outside because of bad weather. 

LANGUAGE.  We’re still in Montessori blue series... currently finishing the secret words, then will be doing some sentence strips and last would be the word list.  I hope we can finish this by end of August so we can start with the green series by September.

MATH.  I’m using worksheets as a guide. But I used Montessori-Inspired Math activities first then once he can grasp the idea I supplement it using worksheets. 

SCIENCE.  This really depends on what I could find from the library and mostly the subject depends on the season.

GEOGRAPHY.  We’ll be doing North America this month and hope to finish the rest of the continents by the end of the year.

RELIGION.  This is something I have yet to add in our curriculum.  Currently, we’re just reading Bible stories for children. I am not worrying about this since Mavi will be enrolled in a Catholic school next year.

I am currently working on our curriculum/schedule for September.  Since he’ll be in school for at least 3.5hrs, I wouldn’t want to load him with so much work here at home, he can play as long as he wants but in case he gets tired of playing and wanted to do something else.... then perhaps we can do some home “schooling”.

More of Insect Activities

I discovered these rubber-made insect toys on a Euro store and bought it right away for our insect study.  My boy was so ecstatic seeing these and played sorting using a tweezer.

 

It was a perfect practical life activity for an insect study :) It include flies, ants, spiders, worms etc.

Then he also worked on the 3 part card for the parts of an insect.  We’ve been doing this activity frequently that he finally understands the difference between hind legs and forelegs.

It’s also helps to have a miniature when working on a nomenclature card.

He’s so used in working with this that he can finish it in less than 3 minutes.   

 

Linking to:

Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Last week, we looked into the life cycle of a butterfly :)

We read plenty of books before we started making our crafts.  Too bad it rained the entire week so we weren’t able to look for some caterpillars or butterflies.

Then we made the life cycle of a butterfly using cardstocks, marker pens and glitters.

              

As you can see, my son LOVES to add details :)

              

Here’s the finish product.  We used cotton balls for the eggs (and he keeps reminding me that they’re sticky so they won’t fall off the leaf).    We did the same thing for the life cycle of a ladybird.

Here, I downloaded it from Education.com (same as the grasshoppers) and made him color it.

Linking to:

Grasshoppers

We studied grasshoppers a few weeks ago and here’s a summary of the activities to go along with it:

PARTS OF A GRASSHOPPER.  Would love to have the nomenclature cards but then, I’m out of the budget :(

I put double sided tape on the boxes for Mavi to stick the labels of the body parts of the grasshopper. Then we did some grid game.  I made him circle the grasshoppers.  I wanted to reuse this print-out so I made him use a pencil instead of using a marker.

Then we discussed The life cycle of the grasshopper and did some coloring activities.

 

Linking to:

Handwriting

How do you practice handwriting?  In my case we do:

Write a story...

               

Trace numbers..

               

Lots of letter trace and copywork.

               

Observations:

1. He doesn’t write within the lines yet.  I still find it hard to explain to him WHY we needed to observe the guides (lines). This is the reason why I try to make him trace my own handwriting so he can practice using the guides.   Any techniques on this one?
2. He LOVES to write in CAPITAL letters. He keeps asking me why he should write in small letters, and I told him that books, newspapers uses small letters that’s why I’m encouraging him to do so.
3. His letter J, S and N are still written in wrong direction (looks like mirror images).  I am not sure whether this is normal for his age but I want to correct it as early as now for it would be hard to correct in the future.

Any more ideas?

Parts of a Ladybird

To conclude our ladybird unit, we studied the parts of the ladybird using nomenclature cards...

...and the felt puzzle I made.

 

Previously, we worked on some activities on the ‘life cycle of a ladybird’, read about it here.

Linking this to:

Spanish 101

We started learning Spanish last week.  Here, he’s learning numbers and colors in Spanish.  Since he knows how to read, he can easily match the labels both in English and in Spanish with the numerical number.

 

For colors, he already knows his verde, azul, amarillo and rojo.  The rest he still needs to learn them yet. So these days, we’re using Spanish whenever we talk about colors so he can get the hang of it.

I am surprise that he knows a LOT of Spanish words, thanks to Dora maybe LOL.