Springtime is Flower-time!

Hi everyone!  There are lots of daffodils growing in the yard and Mavi has been constantly picking them up for his "collection".  So to make use of the flowers I pulled out our flower nomenclature cards and told him that he will need to dissect the daffodils to learn about its part.

Since we did this activity a few years ago, he was so excited to do it again.  Kids love to do this!  I know how dreadful it is to learn about the parts of a flower (with all those weird names).  But if you get to this activity with your kids, with a tactile activity, they will definitely learn faster and the retention is much better.

             

As we dissect the daffodil, I would ask him questions like "how does the petals feel like?", "why do you think that some flowers are yellow some are red?".  As we go along, I also discuss the functions of each parts.  He mentioned that his favorite parts are the petals and the stamens because according to him, these makes the flower look beautiful.

           

If you are interested, you can this Parts of the Flower and Definition booklet by clicking the image below:

Afterwhich we read our book How Flowers Grow and look at the pictures of the different kinds of flowers around the world.

I was also inspired to make flowers in popsicle sticks.  I love how these flowers turned out!   You can place them in a vase and stick them using a playdough or clay :)

            

In our case, we found a purpose for these flowers in our math activity which I will talk about in my next post, so stay tuned!

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The Solar System and The Planets II

My son completed his mini project of our Solar System unit and he finally got to display it in his room.  It was a simple project for my 5 years old, something that I made him work during the midterm break.

I mentioned this previously in my post that we're going to plot the planets in a black craft paper.  First thing, he placed all the INNER PLANETS.  My son memorizes the order so I made he did all the work here.  I decided that it would be best to label the planets so he can memorize the spelling.

As you can see, we added "asteroids"  after Mars.

 

Then he continued with the OUTER PLANETS.

 

When everything is in place, he added stars (stickers).

And we both stick it on the wall using blutacks. And look how pretty it is! He was so happy how it turned out.  He felt proud of what he has accomplished! And I have to say that the use of foil in planets made such a huge difference!!  Now this is art and learning combined :)

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Phases of the Moon

It's my son's midterm break and I'm happy that we could do lots of activities now that he's at home the entire week.  Aside from the Internal Organs which we had earlier this month, we will also have lessons on Space and Astronomy.

Here are the activities we've been doing so far:

A Model of the Moon Phases.  We painted the phases for this year instead of using our felt moons :) 

 

He arranged the phases using the cards that we have and  a picture that we saw in Google.

 

 

And here's the finish product.  This artwork is now in his room.  He would refer to this at night whenever he checks for the phase the of the moon.

 

Observe and Describe. I also printed out this Moon Phases Mini-Book from Scholastic (please click the image below for the link of the file).  Here Mavi gets to describe the different phases.  I love how he can use one single word to describe the moon.

Moon Phase Calendar.  Every night we're checking out the moon and record it in the calendar which I made. If you are interested I made a generic calendar which you can use.  Just click on the image below for the link.

This recording will allow Mavi to learn how it all works!

 

Below is our reference.  We check this image (from Google) if the ones we are seeing is the same as the ones recorded in the internet :)

Here's a link to all astronomy related activities that we have done so far.

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Artist Study: Frida Kahlo

Since we're having a Mexican Unit, I have been itching to tie in an artist that would go with our study.  And by no brainer, we had Frida Kahlo. 

Frida is a very famous Mexican artist who lived a very interesting yet sad life.  She's in pain because of the unfortunate events that happened in her life and one of which is having a vehicular accident.  Because of this, she stayed in the hospital for a long time.  To make herself happy, she painted.  She loves to paint self-portraits with things that would make her happy.

I wanted to delve deeper into the life of Frida but my knowledge of her is very limited.  Maybe when I have the luxury of time, I might as well spend it reading the life of famous artist so I can accurately relay the information to Mavi.  He loves learning about the lives of other people and how it reflects on their works.

Moving on... we started by looking at self-portraits of Frida from the web after which I made these portraits for us to work on.

Using an oil pastel, Mavi put colors on Frida's portrait according to his liking.

 

 

Then he made a self portrait.  He drew his face as I described it to him. He invested too much effort on this one!

"Mom! We should put this in the library!"

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MEXICO, the place you thought you knew

It is so hard to to have after "school" activities lately as it gets dark early in the afternoon. Mavi would ask me why we're doing school in the evening when in fact it is just three in the afternoon.  Though we still have a lot of things to cover up before the year ends I'm not letting  myself stress out and be pressured of my "to dos".  As I always say, the journey of our schooling at home is all about the experience and fun that we have NOT entirely about the output.

Okay, enough ranting.  This post is all about our Mexico Unit which we started last week.  The materials that we used in this unit are the following:

• Flags of North America
• Flags of Australia/Oceania
• My Adventure Book (North America Edition)  (read about it here)

We started with flags.  We review the countries that we have studied so far and compare them.  As you can see we work on the 3 part cards, and country-capital city matching cards.  These are all included in the printables mentioned above.

 

We talked about the colors used in the Mexican flag, and Mavi discovered that Australia and the United States uses the red color as well! So we discuss the meaning of the red color (and why it is always used in flags) and the green color and what it means to the history of Mexico.

Aside from coloring, we made a Mexican flag similar to this project. We used tissue paper and a cardstock.

 

Mavi made an eagle at the center of the flag representing the coat of arms of Mexico.

Moving on... we also worked on the biomes of Mexico.  We did this with Australia, and I decided that we should try a different approach this time. 

We made a map of Mexcio (biomes) using PlayDoh. We use yellow for desert and light green for deciduous and tropical rainforest (I can't find a darker shade of green to represent the tropical rainforest).  Our maps (left) and Mavi's (right) show below.

 

And we added plants, animals and landmarks found in Mexico.

And that's it for now. I'll be posting a second part of our study as I don't want this post to end up like a novel LOL.

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All and things beautiful: history geography

Continents Revisited

Okay so we haven't done serious "schooling" during the midterm break as I wanted then little boy to have some rest and recreation.  In between Fresh Beat Band and Carrie and David's Popshop, I inserted a few math activities which he truly loved.  Then just before the weekend, he asked if we could do "the world map" again.  So what we did was paint the Montessori World Map. Mavi attended Montessori School last year and we've done a lot of Geography lessons, so he's very well familiar with this already.

Because we've done coloring a lot of times, I asked him to paint the map this time.  I showed him some tricks so that he won't go over the outlines of the map.

Then we started mixing colors for the continents (what makes brown? what makes a pink color?).

            

I printed an activity sheet from The Helpful Garden.  I'm surprised he can easily identify the continents just by looking at their outlines even though we haven't done this for a a while now!

          

We'll be having visitors and they'll be staying with us this week so I am not sure if we can have after school activities.  Wishing everyone a happy happy Monday!

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