History: Earliest People

Here are the activities for the first chapter of the Story of the World Vol 1 Earliest People.  (Based on the Activity Book Vol 1) [Affiliate link]

Map and Activity Sheets 

I took a photo of Mavi’s interpretation of the nomads living inside a tent and with a campfire.

 

Cave Painting

The book also suggests that you try cave painting (pretend) as a means of communication or recording of events. 

LEGO Project

As much as possible to we love to incorporate LEGO in our work. So here we made Jericho, the first city… just as the book described it.

 

Jericho, the First City in LEGO Bricks

After reading the first chapter of The Story of the World Vol 1, Mavi created this. This is how he interprets Jericho, the first city built by the earliest people (nomads) who became farmers in the Fertile Crescent. 

“Soon, farmers discovered that it was best to build houses close together so they could help each other to water and tend their fields. These were the first villages.”

 

“Because they were afraid that they may be attacked and robbed by bandits, they built stone walls around their villages. These were the first cities.”

I will post the rest of the activities we did in line with the SOTW Earliest People.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!
Share It Saturday
The Natural Homeschool

History and Geography

REVIEW: Sink and Float Experiment using LEGO

It is a known fact that my son LOVES LEGO.  He loves to think that he can make anything with LEGO.  And one of the MAJOR discoveries that we have this year is that we can incorporate LEGO bricks in our homeschool activities.  Because I find it helpful to use LEGO bricks into our schooling, I decided to add a few more to his collection so we can create more stuff together. You can see some of our works in our Geography lessons and our ever famous Eiffel Tower.

I cannot tell you how happy am I when I was asked to review the visual tutorial of the sink and float experiment of LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Manchester. This idea never crossed my mind at all!  And what made it more exciting is that it involves water play (who doesn’t like water play?)!

 

The visual tutorial is similar to the instruction booklet that you get whenever you purchase a LEGO set.  The directions are simple and since Mavi can read, he did the experiment on his own (I end up being the audience LOL).

So he made his raft out of his brown bricks with details of green.  He made it float and later on added objects in the raft and moved them around to test whether the locations would make the raft sink or float.  The tricky part is when he needs to balance the items in the raft so it won’t sink! It took him gazillion of tries to finally succeed :)

Mavi had so much fun doing this experiment and would love to do this again and again. We would laugh so hard every time we fail!  And even I as an adult enjoyed the activity.We are so glad we did this experiment.  It is also a good way to bond with little ones :)  After which, Mavi was like “Mom, can we do more experiments?”, “Mom, can you think of more activities with LEGO?”.

I will definitely look for more science experiments using LEGO bricks. And LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Manchester is one place where I can look for those amazing ideas.  And hopefully in the near future… we’ll be able to visit the place and try out their exciting learning activities!

Life Cycle: Organisms

 

We started our Organisms Unit early this week and it was a joy Mavi had a great time learning about the living organisms and the different forms of life. I like that we will only have a few activities here. Focus on the quality, making sure that the child truly understands the concept behind the activity.

The key concept of this unit is for the child to learn that there are other organisms besides human and animals. That these organisms thrive and reproduce for survival. The following are the activities that we performed for the unit:

LIVING AND NON-LIVING

Objectives: To be able to sort the living and the non-living objects.

Task:

1. Describe the characteristics that makes an object a living organism.
2. Distinguish objects that are non-living but have been created from living objects (wooden cabinet).
3. What are the three important requirements of a living organism to thrive or grow?

Vocabulary: animal, living, non-living, organism

 

ANIMAL FAMILIES

Objective: Classification and sorting of objects, in order to group them into larger groups (Families)

Task:

1. Discuss the families of the animals, what do you call the father, the mother and the baby and their group.
2. Comparing the animal tracks. Those with round shape, hoofs or prints with toes.
3. Classifying animals whether they live in land, water or sky.

Vocabulary: family, group, classification

   

ANIMAL HABITATS

Objective: Comparing where animals live.

Mid this year, we have conducted a study of the different habitats of animals around the world.  You can view our lesson here and here.

Next week, my son and I will work on the human body.  Still part of the Life Cycle theme… that evolves around organisms. 

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Science on Pinterest.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

The Geological Times

By now, you all know that my son is into history… the beginning of times.  I’m thinking of feeding this current interest and I find myself introducing topics which are unplanned.

Dinosaur and the Land Before Time

My son is obsessed with dinosaurs. Majority of the books he borrowed from the library is about dinosaurs.  His birthday cake was decorated with dinosaurs. So when he begged that we’ll play with dinosaurs, I couldn’t resist.  At the same time, Mavi’s favourite books are the ones in Life to …. He reads it every night and is eager to learn all about the beginning of times.  So considering all the factors, I put up an afterschool learning activity about the geological times and the era of dinosaurs.

Here are the activities we worked on…

Geological Time  

This topic deserves a separate post.  But here’s a preview of what we did here. My son is obsessed with the books that you see in the picture.  It is a three book series which tells the story of the beginning of time, from the big-bang to the appearance of humans.  Now, using these books we traced the geological period from the creation of the stars and planets to the first humanoid.

Dinosaur Family Tree

Another topic which I will have a separate post as well.  My son’s fascination with dinosaurs started this year and so far he has memorized the names of all the dinosaurs that appeared in the books which I shared at the very end of this post.  He’s been watching Walking With Dinosaurs non-stop and Dinosaur Train.  He wants to be a paleontologist and would make videos of dinosaur stories.

With this “burst” of interest, I’m gave him a challenging task of forming the Dino-Family tree using the cheat-sheet and our dinosaur figures.

Periods of the Dinosaur

We’ve done this activity a couple of times but I always add it whenever we re-visit dinosaur study.  For this year, the focus was for him to tell the difference between the three periods (time and the characteristics of dinosaurs living in that period).

Learning About Dinosaurs

  I made a new set of cards for him (he requested this).  I previously made him this, but he wanted to have a new one.  The images where from BBC Walking With Dinosaurs and all the information in the card were from Enchanted Learning.  The are only 8 dinosaurs in this set that I made because I fell sick but I plan to add some more when I see beautiful images of other dinosaurs in our figures.

 

You can get with activity sheet (fact sheet) from here. I made this so I can train Mavi to “record” information of his dinosaurs.

      

Currently, our dino collection is composed of Safari Toob Dinos and Safari Toob Feathered Dinosaurs. 

Dinosaur Fossils

I got Mavi an air dry clay from the craft store and we made dino fossils.  This was a fun activity for both of us as we are trying to make the “best looking fossil ever”.  I realize that it was actually hard to make a realistic dino fossil LOL.

When they dried up, I made Mavi paint the fossil light brown to make it similar to those in the museum.

But he had plans of his own :)  According to Mavi, the blue ones where fossils discovered in water, the red in volcanoes, the green and yellow in mountains and the brown ones were excavated from he ground.

 Parts of a Volcano

Since volcanoes were pretty active during the time of dinosaurs, I added parts of a volcano in our lesson. This one is from Montessori Print Shop.

 Volcano Experiment

And for the most exciting part…. volcanoes and dinosaurs in one gigantic eruption!   

Books

Will prepare a separate post for the books.

More activities in my Pinterest Board Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Dinosaur Theme on Pinterest.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

FREE Feathered Dinosaur Cards

Hello everyone! I made these cards ages ago and we use it to play matching game with our Safari Feathered Dinosaur Toob.  I’ll be posting our Dino Study this week for more dino-related activities that you can do with your little people.  Hope you like my cards.  Enjoy!

Learning About Southeast Asia

Here’s a summary of activities for learning Southeast Asia.

Map and Flags 

Familiarization of the Southeast Asia Map and identification of the countries.

Materials: 

• Asia in a Nutshell
• Flags of Asia Pack (Nomenclature and Pin Flags)

Lego Play

Son is obsessed with Lego, so I just have to use to my advantage heehee.  Here we are making flags of some countries in Southeast Asia.  Typically we paint or draw them, but they’re even more beautiful when you make them with Legos!

Ah and my favourite of all :)

It’s always a struggle to get things done when you Vito around LOL

People, Culture, Lifestyle

We used my homemade materials for this and some books that we owned to explore facts on Southeast Asia.

Materials:

• Asia in a Nutshell
• Major Rivers Around the World

Here we read a book about the great rivers in Asia.

  

Very helpful fact cards.  Mavi learned a lot from this one, especially about the tsunamis in Indonesia, rice paddies and fruits unique to Southeast Asia.

                 

Philippine flag, a model of Philippine jeepney, a model of bangka (fishing boat in the Philippines) and Philippine Peso play money.  These were sent to us by my sister-in-law. And the books which I purchased from the Philippines a long long time ago. 

                

Crafts and other Materials

We made a model of Bahay Kubo!  Read about it here. Surprisingly, I’ve been receiving request as well to post the details of how we made it.  I’ll try my best to post it as soon as possible.  

  

My sister in law gave us a wonderful collection of Philippine-related materials!

            

Thank you so much for taking time to view this post. Our next stop is East Asia!

More Asia Unit here: Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

Religious Crafts and Activities for Kids

Sharing with you some religious crafts we did to go along with our study of Religions in Asia. 

Hinduism

Hindus offer garlands to God and to their guests as a sign of welcome.  Our garland was made of tissue paper and I used a thread to tie them up all together to form a garland.

 

Mavi decorated his hand.  This is a Hindu tradition wherein a Hindu bride would decorate its hand with a red dye called mehndi on her wedding day.

Christianity

One of the poignant moment in Christianity is the death of Jesus Christ.  So here, we made Mount Cavalry using paper plates and paint and added three crosses.  This is where Jesus died with two other outlaws.

  

Islam

We made prayer rug used by the Muslims when they worship Allah.  Instead of making a stunning and complicated design which Muslim craftspeople are known of, we just weaved our rug using cardstock.

              

Seen below, Mavi demonstrates how it is used.

Using Legos, we made a model of a Muslim mosque.  We used a styro paper cup and top it with a crescent symbol for the dome.  to signify an Islam mosque. Mavi loved this one the most!

 

Hope you enjoy this post.  More of our Asian Unit Study coming your way.  Till next time!

More Asia Unit in my Pinterest Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!