Summer Themed (5 x 4) Grid Number Games

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For the mechanics, click here.

Enjoy!

Making Pizza with a Toddler

We’re rowing Little Nino’s Pizzeria  and Mavi requested that we should make a pizza.  So I asked him to create a list of ingredients he wanted to be in in pizza.  He wanted to make a pizza with lots of pepperoni and mozzarella, so that’s what we did!

And we just have to make Vito join or else we wouldn’t be able to accomplish this.

Watch this short video of how the boys, yes including Vito made pizzas!!

Montessori Practical Life: Folding Clothes

We're back from our 3 weeks vacation and it was amazing! Now I'll save details on a separate post, for now allow me to show you how Mavi has been very helpful for the past few days.  I give credit to the years of training of practical life activities based on Maria Montessori philosophy.

The traditional work in the family is known as the practical life work and is the most important area of an education for  life. These practical life activities provides children the  groundwork for physical, mental and social development.   And what’s more important is that it’ll teach them the work habits that will lead to success in academic and in all aspects of life later.

One of the chores I dread doing is folding the laundry.  My husband usually do this for me, but since he's busy most of the time, the folding doesn't get done and the laundry would pile up at times.  Now this is where Mavi comes in handy.  I gave him the responsibility of folding his own clothes, sort and put them directly in his closet.

To start with,  Mavi would sort his own clothes from the pile of laundry.

I placed masking tape on his shirt, pants and underpants and these serves as a guide for folding.  There's a number on the tape to indicate which one he will fold first. 

He enjoys folding as he finds the approach “scientific” due to the order of how you fold a piece.

For now, I’m giving him the task to fold his own clothes. Once he masters this, then he can fold his little brother’s clothes.

 

At the end, he's happy that he was able to help, felt accomplished and proud that he was able to contribute something for Mommy.

More practical life activities can viewed in my Pinterest Board:

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Practical Life on Pinterest.

 

Don’t forget to follow me!

 

This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

Amazing blogs involved in the 12 Months of Montessori Learning

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now ~ The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama's Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Every Star Is Different ~ Child Led Life ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler

Sifting and Discovering Gems!

This is one activity my son truly enjoyed :)  We never had "practical life" activities for quite a while and I was thinking to re-introduce some of it.

                

For this activity, I poured some flour on a bowl and added some gemstones we got from a recent trip to a leisure park.  Then I gave him a sifter to uncover all those precious gems!

                

And it is also a good practice in math! Try counting how many gems you discovered :) 

You can also use sand instead of flour and beads, letters, numbers or objects instead of the gems.

Try it! You're kids will looove it!

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner

Lego Eiffel Tower!

We're looking at the some of the famous landmarks in Europe and he chose to build the Eiffel Tower using his Legos :)

        

Here he tops the tower using France pin map flag.

 

Look who's proud of his masterpiece!  And he keeps on saying "Mom can we go there again?" 

Ahhh... Legos are simply the best isn't it? We haven't tried Playmobil yet, but he's been eyeing them too.

Happy Friday everyone! And have a nice weekend as well :)

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner

Color Your Homeschool with Pasta!

So there’s so much you cian do with pasta :)  It was once a favorite learning tool in our home. Since I’m quite frugal, I barely give him toys from stores unless necessary, instead I made use of what we in kitchen (LOL) to save money and to be practical as well.

With that said, I made these colorful (rainbow) pasta when Mavi was just a teeny weeny.  We used it in so many ways! And here’s how I done it:

Gather various shapes of pasta like bowtie, penne, Rotelle, macaroni, shells etc.  Then measure the right amount of pasta you wanted to use and put them in a zipper bag (Ziploc).  Add around 1 tablespoon of alcohol and 5-10 drops of food coloring into the bag.  Close the bag, and mix (shake the bag) until everything is covered with color.  Leave the pasta inside the bag for 5-10 minutes.  To dry them up, cover a tray with cookie sheet or kitchen towel.  Carefully pour the colored pasta and spread them in single layer.  And that’s just about it!

 

So here’s how we use them:

1.  For color sorting activity.  I have this egg carton box which I painted with watercolor :)  He matches the pasta to that of the color in the egg box.

           

2.  Stringing and Beading.  Good for penne pasta :)

        

3. Playdough Tower

       

4.  Counters.  Again using an egg carton box as our tray.  I wrote numbers at the bottom of the box and he’ll put the right amount of pasta based on the number written. 

      

Those rainbow pasta are really beautiful!  How I miss them :)

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Preschool Corner

FREE Numbers and Letters Playdoh Mats

I’m currently cleaning up my hard drives and I came across old files that were used during Mavi’s toddler homeschooling years :) Some of which are these Playdoh mats which I customized because I wanted something plain, smaller and requires less ink. So what I did was to create my own version, and I added number Playdoh mats as well.

So if you are interested, you can grab a copy of it for FREE by clicking the links below.  And if someone wishes to have a copy kindly direct them back here to my site. Enjoy!
Number Playdoh Mats
Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Playdoh Mats

Linking to:
Montessori Monday
Preschool Corner
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me

Washing Dishes

I let him wash the plastic dishes.  It’s not that I asked him to, it’s just that everytime he sees me working… he would say “Mom, can I help?” Because at the moment he loves to offer a helping hand and enjoys responsibilities I am grabbing the opportunity to teach him how to “work” on some simple things around the house.  

 

And yes, I don’t stack plastic dishes in the dishwasher anymore :) 

Do you let your kids work or help as well?

The Colorful World of Fruits

This was inspired by this post from How We Montessori.

The printed materials were downloaded from At Home with Montessori.

 

This was one activity my son totally loved! What’s not in the picture was when we ate the other half of each fruit LOL.

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Flowers in Spring (Part Two)

It’s so difficult to write a post these days. (been busy with personal work).  Good thing I keep pictures so it’s for me to track back the activities we did on a specific day/week. 

Here’s the conclusion of our Flower Unit which we started a few weeks ago. 

We picked flowers and identify them.  We later on used them as paint brushes.  Read about it here.

Another thing we did was make flowers out of cupcake cases.  We used do-a-dot markers to color each cases then let them dry.

While for our flowers to dry up, Mavi painted the egg carton so we can use them as plant box.

We use pipe cleaners as stems and inserted some beads on it to add a more decors to our flowers.

 

The end product.  I realize that the cases were too big for our plant box, thus... it is no longer visible LOL.  He placed this in his bedroom window and admired it for a few days.

He worked on flower nomenclature cards and puzzle as well.

 

Practical Life

Using clamp and chopstick trainer to transfer rose petals.  

 

Outdoor

Now this is exactly the reason why I always procrastinate to write any updates... we spend my free time outdoors!    It was just so timely that during the time we did our flower unit, we were blessed with a wonderful weather!

  

  

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