Learning the Different Types of Clouds

I recently purchased a few science books for the boys which I bought from Book Depository.  Mavi loves science and I am so happy that the books are child-friendly and can be read independently by older kids.  I love investing in books because my boys love to read and it can be used over and over all through the years. Great heirlooms for family too!

Anyway, the first book he read was the Clouds Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1 (AmazonUS) (Book Depository). This is by far the best book I’ve encountered that illustrated the different types of clouds in a simple way, and the explanations are so basic and easy to grasp for kids. So after reading the book, we sat down the next day and worked on some hands-on activities for retention.

FREE A to Z Vehicle Cards

We are enjoying our week-long Transportation Unit!  Vito loves cars and airplanes and this unit has got him into the groove of playing and learning!  And because I wanted to incorporate letter activities into our units, I made this A to Z Vehicle cards that presents the modes of transportation that begins with letters A to Z.

FREE Color Sorting Cards

FREE Safari Toob Backyard Birds Matching Cards

These cards were used in our bird themed toddler learning matching activity using Safari TOOB backyard birds as shown in the picture.  Enjoy!

FREE Fish Themed Printable Pack

You can use this printable with Learning Resources Fish Counters.

FREE Alphabet Cards

I’ve been searching high and low for alphabet cards doesn’t have cliparts or pictures in them but I can’t find one.  So I made one for Vito as he usually gets distracted with images.  The sole purpose of these cards is for him to familiarize with LOWERCASE letters. He knows their sounds, all of the 26 letters but can’t recognize some of the lowercase, thus these cards are born!

FREE Life Cycle Matching Cards

I have a bunch of life cycle figures which my Aunt brought from the US a few months ago.  I did not really intend to introduce them yet to Vito as he is too young.  But I observed that he’s into matching activities these days, so I managed to create matching cards for all of my life cycles. Wow, he definitely surprised me! He worked on all of these in one day and always picked these for his activity everyday!

FREE European Countries Fact Cards

There are amazing shared printables this week! Before I go there, let me share with you my FREE European Countries Fact Cards that we used in our European Study Unit and The Study of Northern Europe. Mavi loved these cards, he keeps on reading them and learning about the currency, highest mountain, longest river etc. of 16 European countries.

Download your copy now!

FREE Safari Toob Tree Matching Cards

Download here or click the image.
Vito uses these cards a lot in my post on TREE ACTIVITIES and even in random days, he would pick this up from shelf and work on it.
You can get the Safari Toob Tree miniature objects from here.    

Animal Tracks Learning Material

Download a FREE copy of our Animal Tracks. On how we used this, click here or the image below.  Enjoy!

FREE Halloween Learning Pack for Toddlers

Our Halloween learning material for toddlers printable is up!  We are using this as of the moment to introduce Vito to Halloween.  Included in the file are:

• Vocabulary words for Halloween
• Upper and lowercase letters
• Number cards for counting activities
• Pumpkin puzzle match

Link here or click the image to download. Enjoy!

FREE Autumn Leaves Matching Cards and {Learn & Play Link Up}

Beautiful autumn leaves matching cards for everyone!  I made this for Vito for matching activity as he loves to match these days.  But Vito wasn’t into this.  I discovered that he’s more interested in matching real objects to the cards (abstract presentation).  So for now, we’ll be doing more of that.  I’ll try to test him again in a few weeks if he’s interested using matching cards (abstract object matching).  For now, enjoy our autumn leaves!  (Click any of the images for the link or here).

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!

Here are the featured printables for this week!

Fall Leaves Preschool Printable from Homeschool Preschool

Learning About Leaves from A Little Pinch of Perfect

Halloween Printable Pack from Living Life and Learning

Haunted House Letter Sounds Matching  and Halloween with Googly Eyes from TotSchooling

Fall Preschool Activities from Natural Beach Living

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.

If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

• Montessori Education
• Homeschool
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• Fine and Gross Motor Activities
• Kids in the Kitchen
• Healthy Recipes for Kids
• Arts and Crafts
• Natural Living
• Free Educational Printables
• Family-Oriented Activities
• Healthy Living

Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

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FREE Zoo Animals Matching Cards

Vito is 22 months

Vito is in to matching these days! Whenever he sees an object that has a match on books, he would immediately get it and put it together.  We started matching activities earlier with our Farm Animal Activities, and since we moved to zoo animals, I also created a set of matching cards for our figures (all Schleich images).  So far we’re only using the tiger, jaguar, alligator, hippopotamus, elephant and lion figures.

The basket is setup in our shelf, and he loves to work on it in the morning. He would help himself by setting up the rug and work on his matching activity.

If you’d like to own a copy, click on any of the images or here. Enjoy!

FREE Farm Animals Matching cards

We are having a Farm Unit this week and Vito is loving these farm animals matching cards.  This is the first time we’re using matching cards.

I’m using the 3 period lesson for this.  To know more about it read it here.

He was attentive for the first four animals and wouldn’t settle right after.  I took that as a sign of tiredness so we need to stop and did it the next day.  And yes, he’s was still interested and even knows the routine of rolling the rug and placing the cards!

I am loving this wonder years stage!  This is how I set up our materials. Just place all our animals in a basket together with the cards. You can get animal figures as big as these from Schleich.

If you would like to own a copy, you can download the cards from here.  Hope you find it useful!

Thank you and don’t forget to pin this for later!

 

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Dental Unit for Kids

Baby and Adult Teeth

We started this unit with the presentation of the baby and adult teeth.  We differentiated the two set of teeth, from the sizes and the teeth count.  Mavi asked the following questions during this activity:

Why are there more teeth in the adult set?

Why are the adult teeth much bigger?

Why is there a change?

     

I answered his questions through scenarios, like, as we get bigger we eat solid foods.  Most of these are hard to break down and needs a solid set of teeth for it to be digested.  So our body provided us with a much stronger set of teeth to be able to chew, chop and grind the foods properly.
 

And as we go deeper into the knowledge of teeth sizes and shapes, we also examined the different kinds of teeth that adults have.  We have this lovely dental model (Science Time Dentistry Deluxe) of the adult teeth.  I got this from our local shop and it was perfect for our study.  What I love about it is that we can remove some of the teeth, specially the four major types, thus we’re able to take a closer look into it.  I swear, the teeth looks and feels real!

Different Kinds of Teeth

Now this is how our adult dental model looks like.  As I mentioned earlier, we can remove the four major types of teeth for examination.  I created the definition cards for Mavi to use, so he can learn more about each type and their functions. 

With the materials I provided, Mavi is now able to tell which tooth is for chopping, which tooth helps in swallowing, and which one is an expert in grinding!  He’s like “I didn’t know that!”.  Download a copy of the definition cards from here or click the image.

And here’s a closer look at the teeth, sorry, I just love looking at them!

Tooth Cross Section

After which, we also looked into the cross section of a tooth.  To read more about this, click the image below or the link here.

The nomenclature cards that we used are from here.

How Cavity Develops

Moving on, another activity I decided to add in our unit is the presentation of cavity development.  This explains the effects of acid and sugar in our teeth.  The aim of this activity is for Mavi to understand the importance of brushing our teeth, to avoid tooth decay.  The image below is a snapshot of the manual included in the dental set (Science Time Dentistry Deluxe).

The cards below are homemade.  It’s the development of cavity in a tooth, which I had Mavi arranged in order.  You can get the printable file from here or click the image for the link.

Care for the Teeth and Dental Hygiene

So now, the biggest question would be, how can we take good care of our teeth to avoid premature extraction.  These food cards are included in our dental set (Science Time Dentistry Deluxe) and provided us information of the foods that are essential in dental health.  He’s happy to see carrots and apples, eggs, milk and cheese, these are his favorites!  And I didn’t know that green tea is good for the teeth, how enlightening!

We also identified how to maintain a clean and cavity free teeth.

1. Brushing.  The most effective way of removing plaque from the exposed surface of your teeth is by brushing it using a flouride toothpaste.  It is essential to brush every after eating especially before bedtime. 
2. Flossing.  To clean in between your teeth, a dental floss is needed.  It is a piece of waxy string that is inserted in between your teeth to remove food particles that brushing cannot reach. Basically, it removes plaque that get stuck in between your teeth.
3. Dental Visit.  The dentist and hygienist helps check whether your teeth are developing properly, and see if the gums have any problems.  It is important to see the dentist every 6 months to make sure that your teeth are taken good care of.

And this concludes are dental unit study.  It was an amazing week of learning about our teeth!  Hope you find this post helpful, informative and inspirational. Till next time!

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Guide to Space and Heavenly Bodies Study for Kids (with FREE Resources)

I’ve been planning this unit since last month because I wanted to prepare ahead of time. We’ve done A LOT of space and heavenly bodies unit in the past and I wanted to upgrade the lesson, add something new for Mavi to learn.  So right now, I’m sharing our Space and Heavenly Bodies Study for this year. I’m also putting a bunch of links from our previous lessons and activities for your reference. I hope you find this post helpful.

Space and Solar System

               
Solar System and Planets Part I
Solar System and Planets Part II
Planets and Solar System for Preschoolers
Moon Phases

        
The Moon
Phases of the Moon
A look at the Northern and Southern Sky
We looked into the star constellation maps seen in the northern and southern hemisphere.  This is to make Mavi aware that there are stars that can be seen in the northern part of the world but not visible on the other side.

                   
Stars and Constellations
For the details of our constellation study, click here or click the image below.  The material we used here is the Fantacolor pegboard.
Space Exploration History
I made chronological cards of the space exploration history.  The pictures and the fact cards were all taken and referenced from Wikipedia and Wiki Commons.  Though Mavi can read this straight from the site, I wanted to have something tangible and something that we can work on, like arranging the timeline and matching it with objects.

The cards I created contains the year and a title of the major event that occurred in that year.  The description is very much readable by kids though there were a few words that Mavi couldn’t pronounce well or he needed to ask me for the meaning.  Such a good material to improve reading skills, spelling and vocabulary!
After which, I showed him how we can arrange the cards according to their timeline.  This gives him a visual presentation of the order of events. 

Aside from arranging the cards chronologically, you can also use them to match objects.  Here we used Safari Toobs Space, Safari Toob Insects (fly) and Safari Toob Farm (dog).

So if you wanted to have a copy of the cards for Space History Timeline, click here for the link.
Parts of a Space Shuttle
The parts of a space shuttle is something that Mavi really looked forward to.  Oh boy he was so happy that I made him another “flying object”.  The first one was the Airplane Nomenclature Cards, and here’s the newest Space Shuttle Nomenclature Cards.  This is based on the NASA’s space shuttle design.  Using the cards, a child will learn the different parts of a space shuttle.  I wrote the parts’ functions in a notebook because I was out of ink.

To get a copy of the Space Shuttle Nomenclature Cards, click here.
Sensory Tub
Now, this is something I prepared for both of the boys to play with.  Xavi had his own Letter S: Star Unit study last week so it was timely that I prepared this Space Sensory Tub for the boys.  Figures are from Safari Toob Space, homemade PlayDoh planets and homemade Earth felt.