Pine Cone Painting

My son is fond of collection pine cones.  Because I got tired of seeing them around the house, here’s what we did with them...

 

 

Now we got  lots of these colorful pine cones and I just have to look for some baskets in the thrift shop where I can pile them and display it in our kitchen window.

Flowers in Spring (Part One)

Flowers are blooming everywhere! My loves smelling daffodils, picking up dandelions and admiring cherry blossoms.  With his current interest, I pulled out a flower theme so I can make use of these interests.

Here’s a craft which was inspired by No Time For Flashcards.  The number corresponds to the number of petals in the flower.  Then he insisted on adding stems and leaves and grasses.

 

Then on sunny day, we explore the estate to pick up some flowers and identify some wildflowers as well.

 

Once at home, we identified each flowers and matched them to the ones in the books. (Books were borrowed from our library)

We also used some of the flowers as paint brushes for his artwork.

He managed to use the leaves as well :)

We such had a great time working with flowers!  Reminds me of myself wayyy back a long time ago... enjoying picking up flowers during summer with my friends as well. 

Happy Monday everyone!

 

Linking this to:

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day

I’ve been busy these days, my son will be starting Montessori preschool this coming September so I’ve been running around processing papers and requirements. So pardon me if I have no relevant updates at the moment.

Anyway we did some crafts today... one in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day this coming Saturday and the other one is dinosaur related, which my son still can’t get other (see our activities here and here).

Since last week, we’ve been reading books about Ireland, talk about it’s culture and the festivals they celebrated. And from here, we chose among some crafts I pinned on my Pinterest and made him choose what he wanted to do.

He wanted to make paper-plate shamrocks. Instead of using paper-plates, I decided to use an empty cardboard box.

Cut out three circles and paint them with green using sponges.

At first he wanted to use our paintbrush because he doesn’t want to stain his hands. Eventually, he realized that it was fun. (We’re using Crayola’s Washable paint)

We added glitters.

And glued them together. Sorry the the glitters weren’t visible enough.

This is what we ended up later on. We made several of these and placed them around the house.

This was just a simple craft, tomorrow we’ll do another one... hope it will be more interesting though LOL.

We’ll be heading out to the city center this weekend to enjoy the fun and celebration. Hope I can get some decent photos to share :) Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!

Continent: Antarctica Unit (Arts and Crafts)

Mavi is 41 months old.  Last of the 3-parter post on our Antarctica Unit.  

My was in the food for drawing (which was timely) when we started the activities so it wasn’t that hard to convince him that we will draw the things he sees in our Antarctica pictures.  Then to give him an idea on what to do... I showed him a picture of a child’s art work.  I randomly Googled the picture by the way.

He made mountains and and added oceans.  The glitters were snow.

 

We usually work together... I work beside him.  Here’s what I did.  I know! It’s a work of a child LOL. Obviously I am not an artist (I went to Engineering school)!

My son’s work.  He kept telling me he wants to go Antarctica... he whines about it all the time.

Then there was a time I encouraged him to paint.... I showed him an artwork inspired by Antarctica but he insist that he wanted to paint his letters.  He’s been obsessed with alphabets for 2 years!

Another variation was to use watercolors. 

His painting.

  And this was mine.

And lastly, our penguin crafts.  And cutting is his favorite thing to do here! 

The finish product.  Supposedly, there will be glitters all over... but it was already 8PM :(

And that’s our entire unit Antarctica.  If you haven’t read the first two, here’s the link":  Part 1 and Part 2.

We will be doing Asia: Philippines next, but I still have to prepare my materials.  Hope it’ll be ready by March or April.

Linking this to:

Learning about Flowers

I reused our dining table flowers and pulled out a flower themed activity last week.


I made him dissect the flowers and I was so happy to see him in awe discovering what the flower is made up.  Using the Flower Nomenclature cards, we first identified the parts using the real flower that we have.  For me, it would be easier for him to grasp the concept if we use real flowers instead of just playing around with the printables.


I talked about the parts as we took each card, and the role it plays in the whole plant system.  When we’re done exploring the parts and telling stories about them, we played the matching game using the nomenclature cards.  I am pretty amazed how he can easily match the labels even if he doesn’t know how to read them yet.


Then we did flower painting activities.  It’s been a long time since we had a painting activity and I was glad that he was more interested with it this time.  The moment I placed the paints in front of him, he knows exactly what to paint... clouds and trees!


I later asked him if he could paint some flowers.  He asked me to show him how to do it which I did.  A moment later, I came back to check on his work and saw this painting of a red flower.  I was speechless!  He hasn’t done any painting activity before and he came up with this!


With this I am so inspired to teach him more... more ideas on what to paint.

We will be doing more plants and flowers activity in the next few days and I hope it’ll be as fun and enjoyable as this.

Linking this to:

Montessori Wrap-Up

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.