This holy week, Mavi decided to revisit ancient Egypt after rereading the story of Ten Commandments. We dug up our Egypt Picture Book materials so he can work on some readings and do some activities to go along with it. In this post, I will share the contents of our Egypt Picture Book learning pack which you might want to try. It contains: reading materials, activity pages, picture cards and outline cards for coloring.
I finally introduced the Montessori Stereognostic Bag to Vito. The Montessori Stereognostic Bag is often composed of 10 matching pairs of wooden shapes that is drawn in a bag to feel and match. This activity develops the stereognostic sense of the child, using touch to create a mental image of the object. Stereognostic sense is defined as the ability to perceive and recognize the form of objects in the absence of visual and auditory information. Other version of this is called “the mystery bag”, wherein most homeschool moms customized the content of their bags by putting nature objects or just about anything from around the house.
So I gave in to my desire and bought Vito the brown stairs, and boy oh boy, I didn’t regret it! Similar to the way he responded to the pink tower, Vito loves and enjoy using our Montessori brown stairs! I realized that there’s so much more we can do when he used both of the materials, the extension activities are limitless and pattern making is even more challenging!
Oh the boys and I love to play trains! And in fact, I love creating train tracks with them too. The only problem these days is that, our train sets were long forgotten due to Bruder trucks which they recently received last Christmas. But boy, oh boy, that changed when Old Tracks New Tricks arrived in the mail one day, and my 3 years old upon seeing the book immediately requested to play with his Thomas Train!
I am so excited to share our April activities! We will be revisiting some activities we did in the past, and there are new ones too! I only prepared a few activities for April because (1) we still have to work on Earth Science activity trays (2) it’s Mavi’s Easter vacation so Vito would probably prefer to play with his brother than “home” school with Mommy and lastly (3) weather permits, we’ll be spending most of our days outdoors or do some field trips here or there. Anyway, just to be sure that I have something for Vito to work on in case we needed to stay home, here are some preschool activities for him!
I love Montessori math materials. They are so engaging and well thought of that the child can easily absorb concepts and retain what is learned. Take for example this Number Rods which I recently introduced to Vito. We are mostly using counters in our math activities, it’s more abstract and quantitative. With Number Rods, counting here is more linear and sequential. My goal was for Vito to learn:
I love book extension activities. This is one of the reasons why I enjoy doing Before Five In a Row with the boys. So when I introduced the book Harold and the Purple Crayon, I knew that its a story that we can explore beyond than just reading. The book itself is enjoyable to read, engaging and the boys found it funny. Vito was glued to it for a long time. At times, he would even “pretend” to read it by himself, mimicking how I read it to him at night.
If you love this book, or if you plan to get one (highly recommended!) I listed below the areas of learning we touched by just doing this simple easy to set-up activities:
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for this activity. This is a sensorial material for visual discrimination and perfection of colors. I was a little bit hesitant to purchase it at first so we used a DIY. If you skim through my blog, you might have read about our previous color grading activity using water and food coloring. 
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in a separate post but for now, here’s Vito trying out the yellow color (we worked on it one color at a time). We talked about the dark and light yellow… and on how it gets lighter or darker.
and the Backyard Bugs
counters. Vito arranged the counters on their corresponding cut-out colored strips.
and he would often sort them according to colors. But you don’t need to use this, you can use whatever you have in your kitchen. By the way, in this activity we are using the Montessori Color Tablets (2nd Box)
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to pieces and the boys are using this in so many ways other than stacking it and learning colors! I love that it provides different hues of red, green and blue. Because Vito is constantly exposed to this toy, he’s able to identify the dark and light green, red and blue. Mavi even made a LEGO Bricks
version of this rainbow! 
, watercolor
s and markers
! Explore colors using these inexpensive art materials. We are not yet talking about primary and secondary colors, but occasionally I would show Vito that we can combine colors to produce another color.
is our favourite. Vito enjoyed this the most because he loves flipping the transparent pages of the book to see the result when colors combine. Colours (My First Discoveries) is perfect for toddlers and preschoolers!
