The Study of Ancient Egypt

Here’s a collection of activities for Ancient Egypt Study.  We’ve been using the books The Story of the World Vol 1 and The Usborne Ancient World [aff.link] as our guide and references. This is the first time we’ve ever had an Egypt Study and I was very happy of how Mavi showed so much interest.

 

The Desert.  Learning all about the desert and the environment of Egypt.  We used oatmeal to represent the sand and the figures seen here are from Safari Toobs. 

Mummification.  We tried to apply what we’ve learned of how mummies are made.  Here we prepared a few spices and a tissue wrap to embalm our skeleton model (sorry we did not have any human model LOL). So after wrapping the body, we placed it in sarcophagus (box) and added jewels for the buried King to bring with him in the after life.Familiarization with the Egypt Map and the Nile River.  We used the worksheet from  The Story of the World Vol 1 to recreate the map in a painting.  This will familiarize the child of Egypt’s geography .  See how Mavi made his Nile Delta and the river met in the Mediterranean Sea.

                     

Ancient Egypt Toob.  These are fantastic!  The figures are so detailed and Mavi loved examining each one.  Here, we are learning about each figure (vocabulary) so he’s researching in the internet and the book what each means/represent.  The cards are from Memorizing the Moments.

Pyramids. Mavi recreated the pyramids using his LEGO. That’s supposed to be three pyramids, but Vito played and broke the smallest one.

Papyrus.  We also made this using parchment paper! See how we did it here!

And that’s how we study Ancient Egypt. Next year, when we revisit our World History lessons, we’ll dig a little bit deeper on this subject :)  Hope you like this post. Have fun!

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Toddler Beginnings 04

 

For language, I would read Goodnight Moon to Vito at night. He is starting to identify the book so every morning he would pick this from our shelf and give it to me to read.  The Baby First book, I only added this because we are having the “green” theme and the cover is green LOL.         

 

I love giving Vito these activities and he loves them as well!

Craft sticks sticking on playdough.  He loves the activity, but he loves squeezing the playdough more. 

               

Vito can now snap the Duplo together! Yehey! Such a milestone! His finger muscles must be developing well!  He loves snapping and removing the Duplo parts.

                 

And puzzles and meant to be eaten.  Yes, he still mouths most stuff!  He can grip  the holder properly (and remove the parts) but cannot put the pieces back yet. 

See, he can even grip perfectly the small holder of the puzzle LOL

We love these spools and we use it in our transferring activities.

 

                                

Our music exploration these days are merely listening to nursery rhymes and doing action songs at home. We use anything that  we could find in the kitchen to create music and I guess this would be enough for now. 

I can’t wait for winter to be over so we can explore the outdoors already.  I am not willing to set up a sensory bin as of the moment as it takes a lot of time (and planning) to prepare the bin and would require a great amount of work. 

Hope you like this week’s totschool series!

More toddler activities in my Pinterest board.

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AFRICA in a Nutshell

I love making materials for our geography lessons!! It gives me the freedom to choose subjects, topics to touch and most of all give me the freedom to put depths into it.  Now my latest creation is Africa! It is loaded with activities for you and your little ones. (Click the image or button below for the link of the file)

So what’s included in this file?

                                                                                   

 

1. MAPS! The file includes regional map of Africa… and I also included a 3 part card for it.  Mavi loves the 3 part card version. He would always tell me that they are so tricky to match! 

2.  African Ethnic Tribes.  Oh I am so enthralled by these wonderful people! I hope to meet one of them someday.  This activity familiarizes a child of the different ethnic groups in Africa.  Aside from the nomenclature card, I included definition/fact cards for each tribe so we can get to know them, how they are different from the others and they unique practices that they have.

3.  African animals and their skin pattern.  My Mavi loves this so much!  He is amazed by the close-up picture of each animals and their skin coverings!  We love putting them around in the house and see if they achieve a camouflage effect.  Works best if you have animal figures that you can match with it. The kids will surely love it!

4.  African Facts.  These 42 fact cards basically summarizes the important things we needed to know about Africa.  I wrote the facts in a way that Mavi can easily absorb and understand them.  I let him read the definitions.  If you want to learn further, use these cards as your guide in researching more details in the internet.  I am teaching Mavi how to it.  I’m having an AFRICA post soon, so you will have an idea how we put these into action!

 

5. Giraffe and Zebra nomenclature cards.  Working on nomenclature cards has helped Mavi read.  Yes, starting when he was 3 yrs old, we would work on any available and interesting nomenclature cards I could own or interests.  He loves to match pictures and words!  And much more if you are working with animals! 

 

Other AFRICAN-related materials we have can be found here.  So if you are interested, just click the first image in this post or click here to download your copy!

I also made ASIA in a Nutshell last year. Go check it out!

Hope you like this collection! Thank you!

The Animal Kingdom

We love using our printables and one of which is our Animal Kingdom cards.  We worked on this last year and hopefully we get to use it again this summer.  You can read about our lesson here.

When your kids are a bit old, it would be nice to introduce them to the much bigger picture.  This will help them understand that a starfish is NOT a fish and that sponges are animals!  Mavi learned a lot from this lesson and help him understand why animals are classified.

or Scribd 

The file includes:

• The Animal Kingdom MASTER Chart in A4 SIZE
• Chart with pictures only (no labels) in A4 SIZE
• Chart with labels only in A4 SIZE
• Chart with no pictures and labels in A4 SIZE
• 15 cards with pictures and labels to form the chart
• 15 cards with pictures and no labels (for 3 part card use)
• 15 label cards (for 3 part card use)
• Matching definition cards

Hope you like it!

[Ancient Egypt] How to Make a Papyrus

Oh this one fun activity for Mavi! He could not believe that he actually made paper!  Presenting to you how we made Papyrus out of our parchment paper. This is in line with our Ancient Egypt Study (will have a separate post on this).

What you need:

• Glue mixture. (mix 1 cup of flour with 2 cups of water)
• strips of parchment paper.  You can use anything you like here, but I decided to use parchment to make it more realistic LOL
• Aluminium foil
• kitchen towel
• rolling pin

This was our setup. I covered the area where we’re going to work so it won’t stick in the wooden table.

Next, let your kid/s dip the strips of parchment paper into the glue mixture and lay it out horizontally. Do this one by one.

We laid it out horizontally first, and then the second batch is in a vertical position.  This will give the papyrus a weaved effect. Though we all know that in reality, papyrus was formed by laying out the strips in horizontal position only (stripes!).

    

Cover the paper with an Aluminium foil and roll a pin to flatten your work. We don’t have a rolling pin at home so we used the cling film roll.  Wipe out the excess mixture.

After which, dry them overnight. The wet strips are still delicate so I suggest NOT to remove them from your parchment cover. You can easily remove them later on when they’re dry.

And tada!! This is our papyrus! Ready for us! Mavi suggests we make more later after school :)

Hope you find this post helpful! Enjoy making your own! And don’t forget to use any kind of paper you want. I saw some using brown paper as well. That’s cool too!

Geological Time Scale with Safari Toobs

Last year, I was able to purchase the Cambrian and Prehistoric Life Toobs from Amazon because it was on sale.  I’ve always wanted to have them so we can use the figures in our Geological Time lesson. Remember the first time Mavi and I had the lesson at home? It was a hit! He love it so much! His interest came to light when he started reading the Universe Trilogy:

Born with a Bang

Lava to Life

Mammals who Morph

After which he started to do his own “timeline” by connecting the dots in the stories (based on the books).  Because we didn’t have the appropriate figures, our representation of the timeline is incomplete.  And finally, these toobs were on sale and we just have to finish what we started!

So here are the additional toobs that we used (aside from the dinosaur toobs)":

The Cambrian Toob. Loooove them! They are so colourful and the details! OMG!

The Prehistoric Life Miniatures.  Love this well!  Too bad it doesn’t have enough animal figures on it though. But we love it anyway.

So here are my boys, Mavi putting things in action.  I made the paper mat. I simply added the label on the side.

And Vito, taking away the items from the mat and destroying everything that Mavi has created LOL.

Ahhh… here it is! I finally got the chance to snap a photo of Mavi’s work while the little one is napping.

Pictures below how Mavi would research each of the figures.  Yes I’m beginning to teach him to do research using the web.  He’s getting there, he loves reading out loud his discoveries (soon I’ll teach him how to take down notes!).  I told him we can do research in books and in the internet nowadays.  I also made labels for each figures.  They are actually etched on each but it so difficult to read. 

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More of Science-related activities here!

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FREE Ikea Puppets Matching Cards

As mentioned in my Instagram, Vito (and Mavi!) enjoyed playing these cute puppets from Ikea.  Because Vito is starting to appreciate pictures, and learning to identify them, I made each puppet a matching card so we can play a matching game in the next few days.

Anyone interested to download a copy of the cards, feel free to click the image above for the link. 

Enjoy!