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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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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Aboriginal Arts

You've been following me on Facebook, I've shared pictures of our work of Aboriginal arts.  This is still in line with our Australia study (Part I here). Sorry if some pictures are dark as we've been doing the activities late in the afternoon.

To start with, we talked about the Aborigines of Australia and how they use paintings or artworks to communicate.  I used our trusted iPad to check some pictures of the artworks and made my son choose which one he wanted to replicate (he wanted the turtle).

 

I also pointed out that most arts of the Aborigine people uses the technique of Pointillism.  We talked about how we can execute it using the back of pencils or using Qtips/buds. 

When we're done studying the pictures, we started making our version as well.  Here we used red background with contrasting colors for the dots.

            

Another day he asked if we could do it again.  And this time I printed out from a random Google search a ready made art for him to color.

We allowed all the artworks to dry and here's how they look like now that they're dry.  The one on the upper left is my work :)

My son enjoyed the painting, especially with animals on it.   The problem is that he doesn't like pointillism, for he gets tired after making a few dots. 

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Botany Unit: Trees and Leaves

Last week's activities. Sorry if I have to flood this post with pictures as I am short on words.

Trees in 4 Seasons

We made these wonderful trees last week and I think it deserves a post!

Materials needed:  some colored tissue paper and 4 tree trunks (cut-out from paper bags)

 

Cut the tissue paper into small pieces and crumple each.  For the trunks, glue them on a white paper or cardstock.  You might work on one tree at a time.  Such as here, we started with summer... thus the green tissue.  I also advice to use some range from light to dark colors for some accent.  My son had fun gluing the leaves on the trees!

 

Here's our winter and spring trees.  My son decorated the winter tree with some "snowy leaves" on the ground and leaving the tree almost bare.  Our spring tree is a Cherry Blossom thus the color pink.

 

For summer, we have light and dark green leaves and for autumn he wanted yellow and orange with leaves on the ground.

 

And this is how they turned out... and I love it! They all look good together!  I'll find a suitable frame for them so I could hang and display them in sitting room:)

 

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Spring Carnival

Bird Study Part II

Sharing with you the conclusion of our Bird Study Unit which we started a last week. 

You can read about the first part here.

Activities related to our study can be found here and here.

Bird's Beak.  Now this is a new activity which we didn't touch last year.  It was way advance for a 3 yrs old but now that my son can grasp complex information, I decided to introduce this to him.  I got the picture from The Visual Dictionary, it shows some of the different sizes and shapes of a bird's beak.  Based on what we have learned from our Bird Parts Definition booklet (Bird Pack), the beak or bill is used mostly for grooming, protection and how birds catch and eat their food.  Some  are long so they can catch foods in the water, some are short because they mainly eat soft fruits and some can be sharp as they are used to hunt other birds and animals.

So we used our bird figures again to examine the different beaks.  These figures are from Safari Toob and Schleich... I have been collecting them for years as my son loves animals and they're learning materials.

Bird's Feet.  We also talked about the different shapes of a bird's foot.  They are designed to be different are birds live in different habitats. Like birds living in water have webbed feet for swimming, those living in trees have sharp claws etc.  Again, I printed out the picture seen below from here.

I also used this information in our discussion. You can get this from Science Buddies.

Next, we talked about different types of birds.  The picture cards (nomenclature cards) are included in my Bird Pack which you can get from here.  We talked about the unique features and characteristics of each.

This is how we differentiate each one (see picture below).  By using a printable bird facts, we were able to learn how each one differs from another. 

You can download this file for FREE from here.

I love how my son is eager to learn about these birds! 

 

Bird's Nest.  We were supposed to make a nest out of twigs and leaves in the backyard.   But it rained for days and I had a flu bug, so we ended up making some nest indoors LOL.  

               

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Color Theory Part II

We continued our activities on colors and this time, we discuss how tertiary colors are produced using primary and secondary colors.  (Color Theory Part I here)

I took out the rest of Crayola paints that we have and printed out the Color Wheel worksheets from Spell Out Loud.  Again, we used cotton swabs instead of paint brushes.

Here we started filling up the primary and secondary colors in the wheel.

I used this glass that we have to mix the colors.  As you can see on the left side, he wanted to see whether the orange paint matches the orange color he produced out of mixing red and yellow.  We did this comparison to the rest of the colors in the wheel.

 

We completed the wheel but eventually he complained that he’s tired (more on BORED actually).

So right on the spot I cut out small papers and showed him some color mixing activity.  He enjoyed it to bits!  He keeps on guessing the abstract image that we produced.

Look at all these lovely colors!  You should try this at home :)

I made these little butterflies.  My son wanted to hang them in his room, brilliant idea!

Happy Monday!

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