Animal Skin Covers Sensorial Matching Activity for Preschoolers

Spontaneous activity that Vito decided to work on this morning.  You’re seeing my Animals Skin Covers Matching Cards being used with Schleich and Safari Toob animal figures.  Vito enjoyed this activity so much that he kept on doing this over and over again!  And you know what else happened?

Play-based Dinosaur Activities for Preschoolers

Vito is 39 months old.

We are exploring dinosaurs till mid of the month and we get to use our Playmobil dinosaur sets!

Montessori Sensorial Activity The Pink Tower

Vito is 39 months old.

We fell in love with the Montessori Sensorial Pink Tower right after we unboxed it!  I observed that Vito has a liking in blocks and patterns, so we’ve been using the Pink Tower almost everyday recently. And just when I thought that this is just an ordinary material of stacking and building a tower, I was totally wrong. This is one of the Montessori materials I should have bought early on when Mavi was just a toddler/preschooler.  I thought of exhausting the use of the Pink Tower with Vito so he will fully obtain the benefits out of this amazing material.

Fun with Bruder Cattle Truck

The boys received Bruder trucks last Christmas and they’ve been playing with them constantly!   There are so many reasons why I love these trucks, but for Mavi, the size and the sturdiness of the trucks make it a big winner. Anyway, let me share with you one of Vito’s favourites, the cattle truck.  The boys love playing farm and farm animals at home so the truck is a perfect addition to their “small world play” of farm animals.

A Penguin Project for Mom and Kids

Oh I am so happy how these turned out!! The boys and I enjoyed making these penguins using simple art materials.  It took us around an hour to finish everything (with a stubborn preschooler) and we were totally blown by the result!  This art project was from Deep Space Sparkle, one of my favourite artsy website and my go to for painting projects. 

The Montessori Short Bead Stairs: Learning About Quantity

Vito is 38 months old.
This is a Montessori math activity on teaching the child about quantities from 1 through 9. We’ve worked on this since last year (starting from 1 to 5) and has been doing a lot of extensions.  This is a simple presentation of the work and I’m sharing some of the extensions we’re working on as well.

Montessori Inspired Continent Activities for Preschoolers

Can’t believe that in a few days, it’ll be Christmas time!  Our days are now filled with random activities which I’d like to share after the holidays.  School break for Mavi will start this Friday and we’ll be able to finally start our holidays!

Anyway, in today’s post I’m sharing how I introduced the continents to Vito.

We Love BrainBox World!

We are loving this educational board game!  I chanced upon this in a local bookstore, and hesitated to get one though I know Mavi will love it as he enjoys geography activities.  Then one day, while I was looking for Christmas presents in Amazon, some BrainBox sets were on 50% off including this World edition.  I purchased it right away and anticipated for days so Mavi and I can play the game as I was sick and couldn’t do any physical activities.

8 Christmas Tray Activities for Kids

We are currently sick (Vito and I), but the good news is Vito is on his way to recovery (antibiotics) while I’m still suffering from cough and flu.  Though I don’t have any fever but I don’t feel like doing anything at all, just wanted to lie down, sleep or just relaxing my mind from anything. For me to be able to rest and recover, I decided to come up with Christmas tray activities for Vito to work independently with minimal supervision. 

Montessori Inspired Vegetable Activities for Kids (Part 1)

We are all currently sick (since the weekend), we are battling cough and flu.  We spend our days resting, basically just sitting around doing random things like reading books, playing with toys or watch the kids’ favourite TV shows.  Because I was able to do some groceries last weekend, I decided to whip a vegetable activities for the boys yesterday using the ones I bought from the store.  My aim for these activities is to introduce healthy foods to the kids for fast recovery (from our sickness) and healthy diet.   The cards are from my shop and both of my kids love it!

Montessori Botany Learning Materials

Last month, both of my sons fell ill and were bedridden for almost a week. During that time, I had plenty of free time during the day, but was busy taking care of Vito at night. To make the most of my available free time, I decided to enhance the Montessori botany cards and booklets that Vito will be utilizing this spring. I personally handcrafted some of these materials, and I'm proud of the results. If you're interested, feel free to come take a look!

Learning About Fruits and Vegetables for Preschoolers

Vito is 36 months old.

These fruits and vegetables cards were taken out of the storage box and has been used ever since.  It’s been used for naming and identifying fruits and vegetables and also served as matching cards.

November Activities for Preschoolers

Last week, Vito refused to do any of our language activities, so we worked mostly on practical life, counting, sorting and storytelling. He also started walking to Mavi’s school (no buggy!) despite that it’s a 30 to 45 minutes walk round trip.  This lessens our time for “preschool” in the morning since we have to leave early.

Wooden Counting Pyramid Puzzle from Beleduc

I guess by now you know that I am a HUGE fan of Beleduc, a toy company in Germany that produces beautiful educational materials for kids.  The boys love our Beleduc puzzles and we always use them.  You’ve seen us using our Body Puzzle and Pumpkin Life Cycle in the blog lately. And look what I discovered recently… it’s a wooden puzzle pyramid used for counting!

Language Lessons for Preschoolers: RAMFBITG

Vito is 36 months old.

Vito is currently working hard learning his letters, sounds, and expanding his vocabulary. Due to weather constraint we are mostly stuck at home, therefore the lack of outdoor nature studies. So our mornings are mostly spent for his “homeschool”.  We are busy reading books, learning letters, doing writing, and practical life activities.

In this post, I would like to share Vito’s language lessons which you can try in your homes as well.  Remember my post on booklets?  I mentioned in the post that at home we’re learning letters and their sounds in groups (color coded).  First group is RAMF-BITG, second is CUSN-POLH and lastly DEXQY-WXZKVJ.  This idea came from My Montessori Journey, one of my favourite blogs dated back in 2010.  Read more about this grouping here.

Early Literacy with Beginning Letter Sound BINGO Game

Vito is 36 months old.

Hello everyone! It’s been awhile!  We’re having minor fixes at home thus, the lack of updates and posts.  But I am so happy to say, that Vito is FINALLY interested with letters! He’s currently showing eagerness in learning how to write and read letters.  You can check our updates and photos in my Instagram account.  So expect A LOT of letter/phonics/reading activities in the coming days… and months from us!

To start with, we played a BINGO game early this week and I was so happy that Vito loved and enjoyed it!

[REPOST] Continent: Australia

EDIT: Thank you so much to my reader Tracy for pointing out incorrect details of my animals. I have already corrected it and updated the link. Caiman doesn't exist in Australia.. and it's actually a mistake. It's supposedly crocodile but I got confused with my animal figures :( And all the while, I thought BBQ ribs originates from Australia and they actually think of it as American food! Thank you so much! I am so happy to learn all of these as well.

My family will be on vacation in the next few days and I have been cramming these days due to preparations. Aside from that we spend most of our days outdoors because of football practice, thus the lack of updates and post.

Last week, we worked on Continents, and the subject was Australia.  Was very happy that I found these books from the library.   My son loved the books for they had a lot of photos that made an impact on my son.  The books provided pictures of the people and the culture of Australia, which was very very important in our unit lesson.

Now the materials I made were:  the maps, flags, postcards and stamps.   I also skipped printing the currency  because my son isn’t interested with it at the moment.

My son also created the Australian flag out of cardstock (with a little assistance from me).  He knows by heart the number of stars on the flag LOL.

I printed cards for the landmarks and foods in Australia.  We were supposed to make Pavlova, but since we’re not really a fan of sweets and pastries, I rejected the thought of making it in order to save time and money :)  Instead, we made BBQ ribs!!

Then he started drawing each cards.  Can you guess each of it?  There’s an alligator(caiman), the boat in the Sydney Opera House, the Cockatoo, a Dingo and an Emu.

Also, I made control cards for the animals in the Safari Toob Down Under for matching game.  You can download it from here.   Images were googled and if you wish to share it, kindly redirect them to  my blog or on this post for the link.  Thank you!

We plot the animals on the map where they’re mostly seen in Australia.

   

And to complete our unit lesson, I purchased the Kangaroo Nomenclature Card from Montessori Print Shop. 

The next time we do Australia, I promise to add more materials and age appropriate activities.  For now, I think these are okay :)

Linking to:

Internal Organs: Puzzle and Nomenclature Cards

This is my last post of my Human Body series.

After we go about the internal organs, I made my son do this puzzle which I bought when we were in Singapore.  It’s actually an eraser LOL and I got it for less than a dollar :) He loves puzzles!

              

 

And then we worked on the nomenclature cards which I got from Montessori Print Shop.

Hope you enjoy our Human Body unit study!  Hope to be more creative the next time we visit this unit ;)

Linking this to:

Internal Organs of the Human Body

This is the second part of our unit study of the Human Body.  After we have formed our Skeletal System, I introduced to Mavi the internal organs of the human body.  We started with the brain of course...

BRAIN.  I printed a black and white image of the brain and colored it to save ink.  I talked about how important the our brain is, how it controls every senses we have and affects how we think or respond to certain event.  And I added that it is very delicate that’s why we should avoid banging our head so as not to damage the brain.

              

LUNGS.  Our lungs looked funny because they were too small LOL.  Important thing for him to remember her is that we use our lungs to breath. 

              

Then I showed him how lungs work using a plastic.  He can’t resist though and wanted to try it too.

HEART.  Heart pumps the blood in our body and that it produces a beating sound.  This part he loves the most... listening to my heartbeat! I just hope he still recognizes that sound... he’s listening to it for months while he’s in womb :)

LIVER, STOMACH, INTESTINES.  This part seems a little complicated to him.  I just described this system on a level of a 4yr old :)

BLADDER.  The organ that holds the urine (waste water) is the bladder.  He’s interested with it because he’s always curious how and why he urinates.

These are the basic organs that I think are essential for my son to learn as he keeps on asking about his body.  I think it’s not that much though... I just picked the ones I know his brain can digest easily.  We’ll definitely revisit this subject next year! 

Linking this to:

The Skeletal System

My son has been fascinated with the human skeletal system.  He’s been singing Dem Bones for months now and enjoys the skeleton dance.  With this, I decided to throw a human body system unit so he can have an overview of what he is made of.

There’s the books which I got from the library.  I am so thankful for our wonderful library, they have an amazing collection of fiction and non fiction books for kids!