The Polar Regions (Arctic and Antarctic Unit) for Gradeschoolers
Saturday, January 9, 2016
January is usually the best time to have winter themed activities or do either Antarctica or Arctic activities. It is the time when kids can envision these frozen part of the planet due to the cold/extreme weather. To start with, I've setup an invitation to play tray in our shelf and displayed books to go along with it. These can be accessed by the boys whenever they want to and they are not age specific, big boys and little brothers can share and play with the tray!
Landforms of the Arctic and Antarctic Regions
Thursday, January 7, 2016
Science Experiments: What Makes Ice Melt Faster?
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
History Timeline Cards: Ancient Times
Monday, November 30, 2015
Up in the Shop is our World History: Ancient Times Timeline Cards and Booklet. The file includes the following:
- 40 timeline cards of the ancient times (occurred between the period of 5000BC to 500BC). The timeline cards has
- 40 definition cards for each timeline card
- 3 pages of timeline sheets can be connected to form as a guide. The pages are in A4 paper size.
Hope you like it, enjoy!
The Study of Northern Europe
Sunday, November 22, 2015
So to learn about Northern Europe we have the following activities:
Learning the Timeline of European History
Monday, November 16, 2015
Europe Continent Study for Grade Schoolers
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Europe Continent Study: European Regions
Here’s a new study for this year, learning Europe through its regions. Here I was showing Mavi the divisions and the boundaries in the map. I bought this map years ago at Montessori Print Shop. So we’re doing a color code here based on our map in Europe in a Nutshell. Blue for northern Europe, red for western Europe, green for eastern Europe and orange for southern Europe.Hands-on Learning on the European Regions
Thursday, November 5, 2015
So I created these label cards for northern (blue), western (red), southern (orange) and eastern (green) Europe. The color coding is based on our map in Europe in a Nutshell. The mini flags seen in the photo is from Flags of Europe printable.
Investigating Animal Tracks and {Learn & Play Link Up}
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
** contains affiliated links **
We are continuing on our study of animal identification and learning more about their characteristics. After watching Deadly 60 series of Steve Backshall, we discovered that you can also identify animals by the tracks they make! So we used our favourite Schleich animal figures to test this. We randomly dipped the animals in the black paint and freely made tracks. Vito’s helping as well!
The tracks and trails an animal leaves can tell us the type of animals it is and whether it was walking or running, and you can also tell if it was by itself or with a group of other animals.
Footprints of animals are very tricky to identify unlike that of humans! But by thorough investigation, you can tell if the animal is hoofed or with paws or toes. To learn about the footprints of these animals, one must have a proper observation for these unique characteristics.
Animal tracks to note:
- Did the animals walk on 2 or 4 feet?
- Does the animal left a large or small track?
- Was it walking or running?
- Was it just one animal or followed by another?
Using our printable and the actual tracks, Mavi grouped the animals according to the characteristics of their footprints:
- Raccoon and bear have 4 toes front and 5 toes rear, they have claws.
- Dog, fox and wolf have 4 toes front, 5 toes rear and produces an egg shaped track
- Lion, lynx produces a round track with claws, 4 toes front and 5 toes rear
- Deer, elk have heart shaped tracks and has 4 toes front and 5 toes rear
And the highlight of this lesson is for them to see how their footprints look like!
Materials Used:
Thank you for taking time to read this post! You might as well visit our Zoo Animal Tracks post for another activity that involves playdough. It’s a not as messy as black paint
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Science Experiments: Solubility of Different Substances
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Objectives:
- Discovering which substance dissolves in water
- Why the said substance dissolves faster in water
Materials needed:
- salt, sugar, flour, chalk powder
- 4 bottles of water
- teaspoon
- stirrer
Procedure:
Findings:
- Salt and sugar easily dissolved in water after stirring. They have grainy texture and are crystalline thus making it more soluble in water.
- Flour and chalk powder partially dissolved, most of the powdered portion resided at the bottom of the bottles. They have powdery and dry texture, thus making it hard to dissolve in water.
Now, for older children who can grasp complex explanation… I prepared a visual and hands-on demonstration for Mavi to understand how the substance are more soluble, partially soluble and insoluble. Make sure though that when you try to discuss this with your kids, he/she is already familiar with the elements in the periodic table and can understand what “attraction” means, similar to the concept of magnetism. The link I provided is the one where I introduced the Periodic Table to Mavi in a fun and interesting way.
Anyway, here’s how the chemicals of the substance interact to water when mixed.
SOLUBLE SUBSTANCE
I used plasticine to demonstrate the chemical composition of salt and water to Mavi.
Salt is composed of: sodium (Na+) in green and chloride (Cl-) in purple.
Water is made up of H2O, hydrogen (H+) in white and oxygen (O-) in red.
When mixed with water, the salt molecules are easily “attracted” to the water molecules. It’s like the positive and negative attraction in magnetism (polarity). Thus, sodium (Na+) is attracted to oxygen (O-), while chloride (Cl-) is heavily attracted to the two positively charged hydrogen (H+).
Because of the strong attraction between molecules in the two substances, salt is easily dissolved in water.
PARTIALLY SOLUBLE
For partially soluble substances, the molecules that made up the flour or chalk have weak attractions with the molecules of the water. Thus some have dissolved but most of it didn’t and the result are the residues found at the bottom of the bottles.
INSOLUBLE SUBSTANCE
For insoluble substances (don’t dissolve in water) like oil, the molecular contents are NOT attracted to water. This means they do not mix with water and if you combine them, you will definitely see the separation.
Though some advanced students can explain that this is because oil is a non-polar substance and can only be dissolved with another non-polar substance, the way I explained it to Mavi is that oil molecules are just so heavy that water molecules can’t “bond” with it.
This was a fantastic activity for both Mavi and I. More experiments coming up!
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Classifying Vertebrate Animals
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
The Study of the Circulatory System for Kids
Friday, October 16, 2015
It’s another 12 Months of Montessori Series and today I’m going to share with you some simple and easy to prepare lessons and activities for learning the circulatory system of the human body. I mentioned earlier how Mavi was asking me a lot of things about the human heart and the diseases of the heart that causes death in some famous people. Bombarding me with so many questions and that eagerness to learn, we worked on this unit study to:
- Learn about the human heart and how it functions
- What causes heart diseases
- A better understanding of blood vessels: vein and artery
- How to prevent heart diseases
- What’s the role of the blood in the human body
In this unit study, we focused on the three major elements that comprises the circulatory system:
- the human heart
- blood vessels
- human blood
As a bonus, I also added a few pointers on how to have a healthy heart!
The Human Heart
Last month, we learned about the human heart, the different parts and how it functions. You can learn more about it in this post, How to Teach the Anatomy of the Human Heart to Kids.
Blood Vessels
First we plotted the network of blood vessels in our body using our Cardiovascular Information Diagrams sheet as a guide and a printed outline of the human body. We used PlayDoh (red and blue) to represent the vein and artery.
This activity will introduce the child to the basic concept of how blood is distributed in our body. By plotting the veins and arteries, they will understand how the organs in the body receives oxygen and nutrients.
Working diligently to replicate our guide
And he realized that even the head have blood vessels!
We went a little farther by inspecting the network of blood vessels, learning the difference between the veins and arteries and capillaries. Below is a demonstration of the direction of the blood flow in the body through the blood vessels, of how oxygen rich blood enters the artery (except pulmonary arteries) to the capillaries (where oxygen is distributed to the organs) and passes through the vein to enter the human heart.
Here Mavi’s creating an artery, vein and capillary.
He even made his network and labelled the parts.
The Human Blood
This is to demonstrate the composition of blood. 45% red blood cells (red coloured water), 54% plasma (cooking oil) and 1% platelets (bubbles in between).
Care of our Heart
These cards are included in our heart model. It identifies 10 foods that are essential for a healthy heart. Mavi was seriously reading all through the 10 cards and checking if he’s consuming them. Well of course, he eats almost everything in the list except for the broccoli and wine
And that ends our circulatory system unit. For more biology related posts see the following:
For more details on the Circulatory System learning materials you can check this post, Circulatory System Learning Materials.
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How to Teach the Anatomy of the Human Heart to Kids
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Objectives on why we study the human heart:
So let me share with you how we worked on our human heart. Links to the materials used are provided at the end of this post, including where to buy heart models.
The Human Heart and its Parts
Of course, having a heart model adds up to the fun in learning. It’s the closest we can get to visualize what the heart really looks like, unless we dissect a pig’s heart
How the Human Heart Works
Heart Diseases
And that’s about it, our human heart study. I hope you find this post helpful!
Materials Used:
- Cardiovascular System Bundle Pack, this is the bundle that includes Cardiovascular System Information Diagrams, The Human Heart learning pack, and The Cardiovascular System
- Cardiovascular System Information Diagrams
- The Human Heart
- The Cardiovascular System
Where to buy Heart Model (US):
Where to buy Heart Model (UK/Europe):
- Eason’s (if not available online, visit the store)
- Hamley’s (if not available online, visit the store)
- 4D Human Heart Anatomy
- Learning Resources Human Heart