Template Blog Test

Complete Insect Study Guide

Wednesday, 17 June 2015

We just concluded our study of insects and oh boy, both Mavi and Vito had a wonderful time learning all about these creatures! We’re having zoology for this month (12 Months of Montessori Series) and I’m going to give you a complete guide on how to study insects with your kids.

What is Insect?

Start your unit study by learning what is an insect. Put it simply as, it is an animal that has 6 legs with segmented bodies. And yes please, spiders are definitely NOT insects. Now for the Mavi to have a wider understanding of this subject, I put up a sorting activity of the 4 major groups of the Arthropods. Since we've done this last year, Mavi has a prior knowledge of the difference between insects and spiders. He got confused with the crab though, if its either arachnids or crustaceans LOL. Initially he placed it in the Arachnids Smile

These animal figures were from Safari Toob Insects and Insect Lore.

The Life Cycle of an Insect

Now after learning about the animals that belong to the insect family, we looked into the life cycles of an insect. Here we talked about the insects that undergo “complete metamorphosis” and those with “incomplete metamorphosis”. Note complete metamorphosis means, it has the stages of: egg-larva-pupa-adult.

Materials here are Insect Lore Life Cycle of Butterfly and Ladybug

Parts of an Insect

We also learned about the different parts of an insect. I have a separate post on this one. To read, click the image below or here.

Insect Habitats and Bug Hunting

I created guides on hunting insects in different habitats. We have insects found in woodlands (in the forest), those found rivers and lakes, the ones found everywhere and in the meadows/fields. We used these guides as we go “bug hunting”.

We were able to catch a few insects like ladybird (escaped from our net after a few hours), this unidentified insect in the outdoor stairs and ants.

Vito was fascinated with ants! He also had a separate insect study (made for little toddlers only).

Vito’s Insect Study Winking smile

Previous Post on Insects

Thank you so much for taking time checking out this post! To check out my printables and learning materials click here!

This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now ~ Planting Peas

The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama’s Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Child Led Life

Every Star Is Different ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler

Clock Nomenclature Cards

Sunday, 14 June 2015

Our next math adventure would be all about clocks and I made these materials for Mavi. You can have your own copy too! Visit our shop and choose any of these.

Each file has:

12 hour clocks
12 half past hour clocks
12 quarter past clocks
12 quarter to clocks

More printable and learning resources from The Pinay Homeschooler Shop!

Montessori-Inspired Parts of an Insect

Thursday, 11 June 2015

We are having a blast looking into the world of insects! In this post, I will show you how we are learning the different parts of an insects as well as the source of our materials.

Seen on the picture are the materials we are using to learn about the insect’s body parts. The insects that we examined here are ants, butterfly, ladybird, grasshopper and dragonfly. As you can see, this is NOT really hands-on because of two factors:

The absence of these insects (except for ants and ladybird) during the time we have this study. No grasshoppers (tropical country) and no butterfly at all!
We cannot dissect ladybird and ants. They’re just too tiny!

With these, we just used our nomenclature cards and animal figures. Speaking of animal figures, I highly recommend Safari Toobs Insects. You can easily demonstrate the body parts because of the details in the figures.

Resources in the picture:

Nomenclature Cards

We worked on the entire nomenclature cards in the span of one week. Because of the repetition of the activity, Mavi was able to identify the similarities of these insects, like:

They have segmented bodies: head, thorax and abdomen
6 legs
Most have antennae

Each nomenclature card comes with a definition booklet of the body parts. Mavi loves reading our booklets (this is a perfect way to let your child improve their reading skills!)

Montessori Puzzles
I purchased these puzzles before I had Vito. We used it to identify the different parts of an insect and worked on it

Mavi loves to trace the puzzles and made his own version of butterfly.

The puzzle was also enjoyed by Vito. He loves butterfly (even if he hasn’t seen one yet) and chose to work on the puzzle.

Pin this!
Did you like this post? I recommend you pin this for later!

Let’s Connect!
Receive notifications of my updates, giveaways and freebies instantly by following my social media sites. I would love to have you on baord!

Summer Math Activities and {Learn & Play Link Up #8}

Welcome to another week of Learn & Play Link Up! I know that we are all enjoying summer, savouring the heat and everyone just wanted to play. But because we are settled in a place where we barely have summer (because it rains all the time here in Ireland!), I made sure that we have activities indoor to have that summer “feel”.

For this week in The Pinay Homeschooler, I’m featuring our Summer Themed Grid Number Games. Mavi and I had a great time playing this while it was gloomy for an entire week! Sure the weather spoilt our plan for outdoor play but our grid game kept us entertained! To know more about it, click the image below or here.

Now I’m going to feature 4 awesome math post from our beloved readers!

25 Math Games for Kids from Study at Home Mama
Ladybug Love Activities from A Kinder Gartens Vintage Homeschool
Nautical Math Pack (activities) from Year Round Homeschooling
DIY Math Peg Board from Child Led Life
Fraction Activities w/ Printables from Every Star Is Different

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!

11206071_10206383760770609_4191824351964193280_n

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.

If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

Montessori Education
Homeschool
Sensory Play
Tot and Preschool Trays
Fine and Gross Motor Activities
Kids in the Kitchen
Healthy Recipes for Kids
Arts and Crafts
Natural Living
Free Educational Printables
Family-Oriented Activities
Healthy Living

Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest

Vanessa from Mama’s Happy Hive~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jennifer from Study at Home Mama~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Marie from Child Led Life~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jae from Pinay Homeschooler~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Heather from Golden Reflections Blog~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Renae from Every Star is Different~FB~Pinterest

GUIDELINES FOR LINKING

Please link up 1-3 posts
Follow each of the hosts on social media
When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.
By entering a link, you’re giving us permission to feature an image on our blogs. Proper credit & links will ALWAYS be given.
Please visit a couple of shared posts and leave a comment for them
Remember that you must link back in order to be featured

Grab This Button:

<div align="center"><a href="http://christianmontessorinetwork.com/category/learn-and-play" title="Christian Montessori Network"><img src="http://www.christianmontessorinetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/learn-and-play-link-up-150-150.png" alt="Christian Montessori Network" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Please Follow
Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Pinay Homeschooler on Pinterest.

An InLinkz Link-up

Independence Day Giveaway!

Tuesday, 9 June 2015

Hello dear readers!! My homeland the Philippines is celebrating it’s Independence Day this June 12th. To commemorate, I’m having an Asia in a Nutshell giveaway for those lucky winners!

Use the Rafflecopter to enter this giveaway.

Note, I am asking to leave your email address in this format ____[at]___[dot]com. So this is how it should be: if your email address is testemail@gmail.com, then you should write it in this manner: testemail[at]gmail[dot]com.

I will pick 5 winners by the end of this giveaway! Goodluck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

FREE Summer Themed Grid Number Games

Friday, 5 June 2015

I love grid games! We used to play this a lot when Mavi was learning how to count. If you haven't heard about it yet, the mechanics are pretty simple.

What you need:

die/dice
counters
grid game board

How to play:

Roll the dice. Identify the number on the die. Count that amount of counters and place each one on the picture in the grid. Continue playing until you fill out the grid.

Subtraction Game:

For a little challenge, I added a twist! Instead of the conventional one, we played a subtraction game. We used two dice. To play, roll the dice and subtract the small number from the bigger number value in the dice. Say die[1] = 4 and die[2] = 6. So 6 - 4 = 2. Take 2 counters and place it on the grid.

If you have die[1] = 5 and die[2] = 5, you get 0. Therefore you will not have any counter in the grid. Whoever fills the grid first wins! So if you get lots of 0, you will mostly lose the game.