I created a list of Vito’s favourite activities starting from 36 months to 3.5 years of age. I know we’ve had a lot more than 30 but these are his favourite and my top picks as well. I chose these activities over the rest because he mostly asked for these activities to work on more frequently than others. He’s more engaged, he learned a lot of vocabulary words and these were the activities where he spent a lot of his time exploring. So I hope this list will inspire you and give you ideas for things to do with your child around this age.
** Note: Always supervise your child, especially if he/she is handling sharp tools and small objects.
Showing posts with label preschool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preschool. Show all posts
Science Project: How to Make an Erupting Volcano Model
Monday, July 3, 2017
We made this volcano to go along with our First Great Lesson: The Volcano and this is our first paper mache project at home. I tell you, I tried to avoid these kinds of activities and projects because they are messy, and requires a lot of work. But since it’s summer, I decided to try it and much to my surprise I enjoyed making this model more than the boys did. This project was inspired by a post I read from Red Ted Art. So read along and learn how we made our model as simple as possible for less work.
Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant
Thursday, June 29, 2017
This is a follow-up activity on our Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant.
After learning about the parts of a plant, Vito and I talked about how plants grow. We walked around the estate and identified baby plants, some of them were just actually sprouting off the ground and this amazed Vito. We also read the book How A Seed Grows to go along with our activity, this is a really good book! The book illustrates the different stages of a plant’s (bean plant) life, from the preparations to planting up to the the part where the grown plant needs to be moved into a ground soil. We have a few of these Read and Find Out books and Mavi loves to use them as reference. Anyway, aside from the book, I also used the very beautiful Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant from Safari Toob and a homemade life cycle cards (this are now available in my shop, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats).
Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant
Monday, June 26, 2017
It always excites me to introduce new things to Vito. Our recent activity is learning about plants, specifically in this post, the parts of a plant. I love doing plant study with the boys. I’ve been doing this with Mavi since he was 2 years old, and I love doing it all over again with Vito! Printed materials used in the activities were all homemade, and some were used during Mavi’s preschool days. This is Vito’s second year of plant study, and you can read related studies here:
Building Words with the Moveable Alphabet and Objects
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Vito is 43 months old.
I am so excited to share that we’ve finally started building words using our moveable alphabet! I had fun working this with Mavi long time ago and I can’t believe I’m doing this again with Vito. This is the part of Montessori language arts that I love the most, teaching kids how to read! In my previous post, I talked about how we are using objects and miniatures in learning about letter sounds which is essential in reading.
How To Introduce Clocks to 3 Years Old
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Vito has been playing with Mavi’s learning clock and pretending that he’s able to tell the time (he always says 8' o’clock), so I decided that it’s about time that I should introduce this very important tool in telling time. I remember doing this activity with Mavi back in 2012. In this post, you will see how Mavi and I worked from creating a paper plate clock to matching analog clock with its digital label.
Montessori Inspired Shark Study for Kids
Friday, June 16, 2017
My 8 year old Mavi is into sharks nowadays and asked if we can do a study about them. The last time we had a shark study was years ago, when he was 4 years old and this time he wanted to use our Shark Anatomy Model which he recently bought. This is Vito’s very first shark activity and he had so much fun learning with his big brother.
Favorite Activities at 43 months
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Montessori Geometric Solids as a Sensorial Material
Monday, June 12, 2017
I would like to introduce one of our favourite Montessori material at home: the geometric solids. This has been on my bucket list for the longest time and I finally get to own one! This is totally worth-it! This material will introduce the child to the 3D objects and shapes, that will later on be helpful in the learning of geometry. I listed below the progression of activities of the geometric solid intended to guide parents on how to use this material in case you own one or are planning to have one in the future.
Montessori Inspired Insect Activities for Preschoolers
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
Here’s a summary of our insect activities for the past week. Most of these materials are old and reused and many of our activities were not planned but are based on Vito's interest because bugs and other tiny creatures appeared earlier than expected. Hope this post will give you some ideas on learning activities about these creatures!
Hape Domino Set
Monday, June 5, 2017
Have you heard of the Domino Set by I Love Hape? This toy is just awesome! I got it early this year to teach Mavi how to strategically design a game, basically a maze made by dominoes. Now that Vito is older, we decided to share this with Vito so he will learn how use it and enjoy the fun of creating dominos. And oh boy, this has been Vito’s favourite for the past few days!
Beginning Reading: Language Objects and Activities
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Language activities are a favourite in the house now as Vito’s interest in reading has peaked. We are using language objects more often to practise letter sounds through games (aside from sandpaper letters). These language objects that we have were collected through the years, starting from Mavi’s time and it has been very useful now in Vito’s journey on beginning reading.
What are Insects?
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Here’s a simple way of telling whether an animal is an insect: has 6 legs (with or without wings). This is something new to Vito, the word “insect”. He usually calls them with their real names like flies, bees, dragonflies, etc. but is not familiar with their category. Now, this is the first time that I introduced this concept, so he struggled a little bit until we started counting the legs!
Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of Insects
Monday, May 29, 2017
Vito and I have been talking about insects in the past few days. I mentioned in my previous post, the current interest on insects was brought about by their sudden appearance. So far he has encountered quite a few already like garden ants, flies, wasps and bees, and bugs. It’s a shame we haven’t seen grasshoppers and dragonflies here, I used to catch and collect them as a child (back in Asia). Anyway, since our last activity on Farm Families, Vito still loves to learn about mommies, daddies, and babies, thus I introduced the life cycle of insects early on in our activities. Unlike my past activities with Mavi, this one is very simple and straight forward.
Montessori Inspired Butterfly Coloring Matching Activity
Friday, May 26, 2017
Saw this idea from one of my favourite Instagram account Momducator. It’s a brilliant idea of using Montessori color tablets (set 3) to match with the butterfly colors of Safari Toobs (Insects, Butterflies, Bulk Bag). This is a great practise for visual perception, picking the right color combination to match with the butterflies.
Plants versus Animals Sorting Activity
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
I am so thankful for The Helpful Garden for providing us this printable (saved me a lot of time!). Of all the plant and animal activities that we have done in the past, I have forgotten this one basic activity for Montessori botany and zoology: identifying plant and animals.
Learning About Farm Families
Friday, May 12, 2017
I shared in my Instagram last week that Vito is obsessed with the concept of “mommy, baby, and daddy” thing. He would always pair our animal figures into families and do play pretend. This made me decided to introduce Vito to the farm animal families which I introduced to Mavi a long time ago (Farm Families - FREE Sorting Cards). There’s a deeper explanation why we teach kids about animal families. We teach kids to distinguish and describe objects to form them into bigger groups. Commonly, we group inanimate objects according to their size, shape and color which is an easy task for the child. But when it comes to real organisms with no definite shape, size and color, it is more difficult to recognize similar characteristics.
Montessori Inspired Farm Activities for Preschoolers
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
It’s going to be an exciting month for Vito as we are learning about the farm and farm animals! Kids are so fascinated with the farm, probably because of the domestic animals that can easily be identified and the fact that the farm is where we mostly get our food. Early in life, the kids are educated that the milk comes from the cow, eggs from chicken, wool from sheep and etc. At first, we visited a few farm animals in the zoo weeks ago. We pet some goats, chicken, and seen some donkeys and cattle for Vito to experience. We’ll be visiting a real farm this month too, and hopefully we’ll get to see some real farming work!
Now, for extension work, here are some activities I prepared for Vito at home to learn more about the farm. We’re starting some of these already and you can see the photos in my Instagram account. Please follow me there for real time activities!
Magnatiles for Creativity
Monday, May 1, 2017
We love Magnatiles! If you’re following my Instagram, we used this often times at home during free play. I hesitated for the longest time before I purchased these amazing magnetic tiles because of the price, but oh boy, they are so worth-it! Aside from the fact that it has some educational value, it is also an open ended toy which the boys love to use for building castles, houses, forts, cars and just about it anything! The possibility is endless thus we love it!
Introducing Kids to Construction Tools
Sunday, April 30, 2017
If you are like us, who has no means of doing some carpentry work, then this post is for you! For one thing, my father and his entire family are carpenters. They make furnitures, build houses and buildings in my home city and I remember spending most of my time during summer vacation in construction sites managed by my grandfather. This is the reason why at a young age, I know how to use most carpentry materials despite my mom’s warnings. Sadly those skills weren’t passed to the new generations. But that doesn’t mean we can’t expose our kids to this simple carpentry work like hammering, using nuts and bolts, drilling and the like. And of course, with the advent of IKEA, we need to somehow teach them all about DIYs and these basic tools.
In this post, I’m sharing our learning toys and materials in exposing my 3 years old to some of these construction tools to acquire those basic skills .
In this post, I’m sharing our learning toys and materials in exposing my 3 years old to some of these construction tools to acquire those basic skills .
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