B4FIAR: Corduroy Part 2

Was inactive for a while due to work loads.  While I was preoccupied with personal stuff, I keep my son busy doing activities while we’re still stuck at home due to freezing temperature outdoor.  So the past few days, we simply continued with our Corduroy unit activities.

Here he is doing the bear craft on his own.  I basically sat there watch him do this thing.  

              

              

We also worked with Read and Spell, which I downloaded from Homeschool Creations.  Since we started with Before FIAR, the read and spell became his all time favorite.

We practiced buttoning using the button snake which I made a few months ago.

Corduroy is a story that deals with emotions as well.  So I got this matching game from Montessori Print Shop and we enjoyed matching each facial expression.  My sad had a great time imitating the pictures :)

B4FIAR: Corduroy by Don Freeman

Our first Before FIAR unit for the year 2012 is Corduroy.  This story has been the focus of our activities since Monday aside from our daily worksheets.  Printables used in the activities below were sourced from:  Homeschool Creations and Homeschool Share.

Learning beginning and ending sounds of objects in the story.  Mavi did very well with his beginning letters ... but still fail to identify some ending sounds.

Sorting objects whether they’re furniture or not.  After this we also roam around the house to identify ‘real life’ furniture.

I introduced for the very first time the concept of less and more using our buttons (we often use these as counters).   It was a good start :)  We’ll be doing more of this as he progress then I can introduce the symbols less than and greater than.

We simply distinguish which is more and less (for now).  We did a couple of rounds and he finally got bored. It didn’t interest him that much.

Another Corduroy math-related activity was counting pennies.  Lisa has to save so she can buy Corduroy and this is exactly what we did here.  We don’t own a piggybank so I just printed this out as well.  This is an addition game, and we used our play money (coins) instead of printing the paper coins that comes with this printable pack. We pretended that I gave him money, and so is his Dad... then he needed to count the total amount of the coins we gave him and see if he can buy his favorite toy from the toy store.

Another math activity was “where’s the button” game.  He arranged the numbers in order for this activity.  I hide the game piece (button) underneath the number and made him guess what number the button is underneath.  I only printed out the ‘teens number so we can practice more of this, since he still gets confused of their names.

 

Patterning activities using printables and buttons.

We painted his favorite toy Thomas the train and asked if he could paint our house :)

Later we painted Corduroy together.

    

We placed the painting inside his room and loves how it resembles the Corduroy in his book.

Linking this to:

B4FIAR: Blueberries for Sal

Mavi is 37 months old.

We’ve been reading this book along side Bear Hunt but I decided that we should separate the unit studies for each book.

Here are the activities we did in line with Blueberries for Sal.

LANGUAGE.  Determining beginning sounds of pictures from the clipcards which I downloaded from the B4FIAR packs. 

Read, build and spell of words based from the books.  This is currently his favorite activity. 

 

I love it that would read the word using their phonic sounds :)

 

PRACTICAL LIFE.  Sorting blueberries (blue pompoms) and other berries hehe using a clamp.

MATH. We did an introductory lesson on addition using blue pompoms as blueberries.

 

After combining the orange containers, here he is counting the number of blueberries after adding 2 plus 2.  Will provide a separate post on this.

 

Tracing lines.

         

I observed that on the end part of the line, his trace becomes a little jagged.  He must be tired.

 

Doing the worksheet from First School.

Later on I found him reading the words again. 

ARTS.  We made bushes with lots of blueberries and added tree stump.  I cut all the necessary stuff, then I taught him how to make mini balls of cottons and glue them on the bushes.  He made all the cotton balls here and asked him to put blue paints to make it look like blueberries.

We seldom have crafts activities and I was glad that we did this because he truly enjoyed the activity.  It’s his first time to work on cotton balls and he was amused.  He did this activity while I was doing the dishes, with less supervision he was able to do what I wanted him to accomplish.  By the time he finished his work, he was so happy and he immediately displayed it in his room.

This is his finish product.

B4FIAR: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen

Mavi is 36 months old.

My son picked We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen as our next unit for B4FIAR.  And since I realized that the subject here is on bears, I find it wise to row Blueberries for Sal at the same time.  So we’ve been reading these books everyday, and singing Rosen’s bear hunt song at the same time.  But the focus of this week’s activities is on We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.

STORY SEQUENCING.

A wonderful activity that we truly enjoyed.  Read about it here.

Then we further explored the book by doing our very own bear hunt activity.  I posted it here.

 

MATH.  We did two versions of bear counting. The first was inspired by this post.  I love how they practiced counting and color sorting at the same time.

Then we also had our version of cards and counters (bears) but instead of using a number symbol, I used a hand symbol to indicate the number of bears to be counted.  Surprisingly, my son can recognize what number the hand signifies by just looking at it :)

 

I also made some pattern matching printables to go with our unit study.  Here, Mavi has to matched the patterns.

We studied animal tracks and played the matching game.  I got the file that I printed out from here.

I wanted to demonstrate what is animal track and how they differ from one another so I made use of our playdough and some of his animal figures for this.   Happily, each animal figures produced different tracks.

He enjoyed making tracks and this animal track activities.  He keeps asking for it for several days.

LANGUAGE.

Using the B4FIAR packs I downloaded from Homeschool Creations, we build, spell and read words

He easily build the word “mud”.

But with words with composed of more than 5 letters, he would at times miss the correct order of the letters.

Then there’s the clipcards for practicing beginning letter sounds.

 

SCIENCE.

The subject for this unit is bear, so I was happy to get hold of the brown bear book from our library.  It basically consist of everything that you need to know about this massive creature.  This book was very informative.  It first started describing the different parts of the bear, then goes to describe the bear habitat and youngs, how they search for their food, how they sleep and how they play. 

I looovee this book.  It has wonderful pictures that my son can clearly visualize what a real bear looks like.  I hope I own the whole series.

I downloaded worksheets from Kidzone and First School for our bear study and writing practice.

PRACTICAL LIFE.

We did a bunch of cutting activities.  I made use of our old magazines instead of printing a cutting strip. 

First, I made a guide for him to cut that is by marking the borders of the picture in the magazine as shown above.  Then he has to cut the picture using that guide.  So far, he liked this idea of cutting magazines and with lines.

Then he asked to cut more.  And told me that he wants to make the guide this time.

Mavi tracing the brown the bear.  He didn’t color it though.

The worksheet from First School.

Working on the pre-writing sheets that comes with the pack.

          

PLAY PRETEND.

He wanted to experience being  a bear. So I made him claws which he really really love!  Then he looked at the picture of the brown bear from this book and told me he should also have a brown face, so I made him a brown mask as well.

Well I just thought that these pictures were so funny.  He tried to growl like the bear and keep roaming around the house scaring me and his Dad :) Precious.

And that’s what we did for our We’re Going on a Bear Hunt unit.  Hope it inspire and entertained you :)