Safari Ltd Mammal Skulls Discovery Play

The boys are loving these mammal skulls which Safari Ltd has sent us!  They specifically love to bury these in the kinetic sand and play scavenger hunt or play-pretend to be scientists.  This is one of the afterschool activities the boys enjoy playing together and working independently.

Learning the Life Cycle of a Frog for Kids

We've been learning about frogs for the past weeks and finally we get to use our Life Cycle Frog layered puzzle from Beleduc.  This is such a beautiful piece of layered puzzle showing all the development stages of a frog’s life in tiers.  If you are trying to find ways of incorporating hands-on materials in teaching the life cycle of these type of animals then read on to find out more about our activity.

Montessori Inspired Frog Activity Trays for Preschoolers

In my Instagram, I shared that we’ve been observing frogs (tadpoles) in the park for weeks now.  This has fascinated the boys, most especially Vito.  To extend this learning experience I prepared activity trays (again, a favourite!) tailored for him so we can explore this new discovery.

Learning Multiplication Using Montessori Colored Bead Bars

My previous post on multiplication using the Montessori Multiplication Bead Board has been very popular, and I’m so happy that a lot of people find it useful.  Now in this post, I’m sharing that the use of Bead Board is just one of the many ways of teaching multiplication in a Montessori classroom.  Another favourite of ours is the use of the colored bead bars.  This is usually introduced after the Multiplication Bead Board or the Charts (though I will share about the Multiplication Charts soon!).  We’ve worked with several multiplication activities using the bead bars, but in this post, I’m just going to highlight the basic presentation.   Again please note, that this is based on a home set-up.

How I Organize Our Montessori Inspired Learning Space at Home

We are back from our vacation and after settling, the boys and I decided to clean-up and organize our shelves for homeschool 2017-2018.  Now, we have a tiny space, just one space for our homeschool and there’s nothing fancy.  I ensure that this learning space of ours is relatively clean all the time, well ventilated, well lighted and conducive for learning.  To those who wanted to know more on how I organize our materials in this small space, allow me to give you a walkthrough!

First Great Lesson (4): Study of Elements and the Periodic Table

A few weeks before our vacation, the kids and I worked on the periodic table.  We did this years ago, and Mavi was so excited to work on this activity again.  This is a continuation of our Great Lessons, and if you are new to this post, you can revisit the first and second part of the activities here:  (1) Experiments on the Laws of the Universe and (2) The Volcano

What You Need to Know About the Early Childhood Montessori Math Materials

I adore Montessori math materials and how it enables the child to experience the true meaning of quantity and numbers.  Montessori math is not just about memorization, counting and abstraction, its main goal is to build a relationship between the child and the materials, learning with ease and enjoying the work through engaging activities.  I own most of the Montessori math early childhood, and starting to collect the elementary for my oldest child.  They’re quite pricey, but worth it. On how to use these materials, I have albums from The Montessori Parent, Cultivating Dharma and Garden of Francis, and I also administer other extension activities that I could think of (I love doing this!).

Hands-on Learning of Equivalent Fractions

I enjoyed presenting this activity to Mavi, and he enjoyed this work even more.  In this activity, we used our Fraction Magnetic Pies, and a DIY frame instead of the Montessori fraction insets.  The album that was used here was from The Montessori Parent.

Montessori Weather 3 Part Cards

Few weeks ago, I introduced Vito to some weather types because we were experiencing extreme weather conditions in one day.  I mentioned in my Instagram post that we even experienced hail during the early weeks of summer! Talking about the weather cards, here are the materials I prepared for him:  Weather Cards from my shop, Weather book from National Geographic and The Weather from My First Discovery book.  The booklet you see in the photo is from our Weather Cards set.  The books here are really good and we would read it mostly at night but sometimes Vito would remove them from basket and would skim them to check out the pictures or pretend to read it (mimicking my reading).

The first time I talked about the weather with Vito was here, the activity was very simple, but he learned a lot from this.  We are still using this chart up to now!