Word Family Strips
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Study of Birds
Monday, November 21, 2011
Last week my little boy got so interested with birds that I have to whip out my bird-related resources to give him a unit study of birds. As you all know, I don’t have a printer yet and I just have to reuse old materials which I already have.
BOOKS. Each day, I TRY to read him books. I use to schedule it in the morning, but we aren’t religious with it. There were times he wanted to do lots of play pretend in the morning and would ask me to read him books in the afternoon, and vice versa. Since I don’t have any access to our library yet, I just selected books which has “birds” on it for our theme last week.
3 PART CARDS. We love these cards! Oh and it’s tempting to hoard them Montessori Print Shop! My son participated well when we did the Parts of a Bird. To show him the parts aside from the control cards, I used our bird figures to point to him certain parts described in the cards. He loves it! And for a much understanding, I have to make a comparison of the bird parts and his body parts. He understands well that he doesn’t have a tail :) He keeps reminding me of that.
What we normally do with nomenclature cards after discussing each part is to match the picture cards and the labels to the control cards. My son loves matching cards that we did this activity in 3 straight days together with the Lifecycle of a Chicken.
LIFE CYCLE OF A CHICKEN. Chicken are birds too, right? LOL. These cards were homemade, when I still have the time and energy to make nomenclature cards for personal use. And then I realized that it’s eating much of my time, so rather than spending a full day of photoshoping I decided that it would be wise to purchase ready-made.
And he asked me where’s the part that we have to eat the chicken. LOL.
My homemade bird puzzle :) My son wants to add a goggly eye but strangely I couldn’t find them at that time. I found this puzzle pattern (together with other animal patterns) in this site. Boy, I’m so glad they’re sharing it on the web!
GRID GAME. My son can’t get enough of this game. We tried this game last year but he was more interested with the dice than the game itself. But this time, I was glad that he got over with his fascination with the dice and participated well in the game. He can identify the number of dots in the dice long before we did this, so he didn’t find it difficult at all reading the dots. He loves putting “candies” on the chicken.
SIZING. I got it from here.
To be honest, I wanted to do more with this subject but sadly, I couldn’t provide additional resources. So next time we revisit this, I might add the following:
- Bird matching game.
- Own Exotic Birds and discuss each birds, how they differ, and probably make control cards to match the object with the card.
- Create bird’s nest for crafting.
- Outdoor bird watching. It rained the whole week so we were not able to bird watch.
- Paint birds.
But even though we miss a few activities, it was still fun theme to explore!
Linked to :
More Use of Do-A-Dot Markers
Friday, November 18, 2011
Wow! It’s been months since we last used these markers. My son love them the first time I gave it him. He loves making dots and sometimes would smear them if he gets tired. He enjoys using these markers so much that he started to apply them on his body and it was so difficult to remove them. Sadly, it wasn’t that washable in same way as the other markers and crayons.
And he was so happy to see these markers again. I decided that maybe... he’ll try to use it properly this time (crossing fingers). Just note, when a child uses them, be sure to supervise.
Math. Tens stamping game. Here we used the marker to stamp the number/s whenever I mentioned them (on a story).
LANGUAGE. Word identification.
ART/COLORING. We also used it for coloring.
Montessori Wrap-Up
Saturday, November 12, 2011
We did these a few weeks ago and because we spend too much outdoors these days... I forgot to write about it.
Learning how to read using the pink series objects and Melissa and Doug’s magnetic letters. What we did here is that I would make the sound of each letter of the word via segmentation and Mavi has to form that word using the magnetic letters. I use the our CVC objects as his guide... but here he has to form the correct order of letters on his own according to the sounds I make.
Learning to count from 10 to 20. Here he has to put the correct number of buttons on the sheet based on the number card I show him. This is just to enhance his counting skills for the ‘teens number. We did an introductory to the ‘teens number here.
A matching game using number cards and beads. He has to match the number cards to that on the beads on the felt sheet.
Using bear counters in practicing counting 11 to 20.
Skip counting by tens. From here we will practice counting 30 to 50.. then to 100. I will also start giving him skip counting activities by 2’s, 3’s and 5’s.
Guess the letter game. He has to guess the letter that he is holding through his sense of touch. It’s similar to mystery bag game. This one he liked so much but he peeks through the eye mask most of the time... but it was really fun. We should be doing this more often as it involves the use of his other senses.
Then he did lots of cutting and gluing. Mostly he wants to do things on his own and doesn’t want to be instructed. He would just ask me for a paper, colored pens, scissor and glue and would do free play. He would pretend he’s ion Artzooka and doing crafts. But I insist that I supervise as he is using scissor.
He loves to draw... he loves to create trees, grasses, the sun... then there’s drawing of his family, with houses and cars :)
B4FIAR: Blueberries for Sal
Sunday, October 9, 2011
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.
Montessori Wrap-Up
Monday, October 3, 2011
Mavi is 37 months old.
September 26 to October 2, 2011.
Pink Series
Practice CVC words using our pink series sets 1 to 4.
He loves our reading activities and I was surprise that he reads using their sounds not through memorization.
Then we worked with our ‘rambitg’ alphabets and try to build CVC words from it. I really would like to instill in him that using letters, we can form words! This also increased his vocabulary for he learned some new words like: rib, tab, bar, fig etc.
We made trees using oil pastels.
Phonics
I talked about it here.
Math
Read about our math lessons here.
Since it was also raining, I made use of our size ordering cards which I downloaded from Confessions of a Homeschooler two years ago. He’s learning sizes here and using “smallest” “biggest” and “bigger” words.
Art
Attempting to do a Kadinsky painting. It was a lovely day so I took him out on the balcony to paint.
Too bad, the paper we used were not made for watercolor :(
Here’s my version. I was also painting with him so I can show him what to do and describe the mechanics.
Drawing and Writing
These activities were his favorite this week. He kept on making drawings and describing them with words that he alone can understand. I ask him “what is it?” and he would say something like “it’s a blurg”. Still I admire it in front of him and telling him that he did a great job.
This is a table.
Practice writing his name.
Practical Life
His favorite practical life activity: cutting. Aside from this, he kept helping me with the laundry.
Botany: Trees
A wonderful week of studying trees! Read about it here.