Introducing Life Cycles to Younger Kids

Springtime is all about life cycles in our home.  And I'm often asked how do I introduce life cycles to our little ones and to those who couldn't visualize the concept of metamorphosis, larva and pupa, and etc.  It's pretty easy and simple though.  I start by telling stories that like humans, baby animals come about through their mommies and daddies.  Some start from egg and then they develop or grow into an adult just like humans.  You also need to have some learning materials to help explain these things better to  kids.  Because we are observing the "Montessori" philosophy in our homeschool, we use learning materials that can provide realistic presentations of these life cycles to the kids.  Also if possible, provide a hands-on learning experience using the same learning materials or through real life observations in nature.

FREE 12 Days of Christmas Counting Cards

We love the 12 Days of Christmas song!  The kids love it so much that we kept on singing it over and over again and always speeding up as we approach the 12th day.  So as part of the kids’ interest, I decided to create these counting cards to go along with the song.  Vito enjoys setting up the counting cards as we sing each of the day.  To share our love for the song, we are sharing the counting cards to you so you can do this activity at home with your kids too! Enjoy!

Christmas Themed Tray Activities for Preschoolers

Happy first day of December!!!  I’ve been away for awhile, busy with life and other extra curricular things… because you know, “it’s that time of the year”.  Anyway, despite of  all the happenings, I was able to assemble these simple Christmas-themed activities for my 4 years old.  My aim here is to simply introduce the meaning of Christmas, the symbols, learning Christmas songs and a little bit of  arts and crafts.  Hope you like these activities!

Thanksgiving Themed Rhyme and Beginning Letter Sound BINGO Game

My 4 years old absolutely loves our Thanksgiving rhyme and beginning letter BINGO game!  He loves rhyming words, so I just have to come up with some activity to feed this interest.  Since we’ve been exploring beginning letter sounds, I also added this to our game.

Introducing the Montessori Pink Series for Beginning Reading

I've talked about Vito’s sensitive years for letters in my Instagram account.  Since September, he’s been into letter sounds, identifying beginning letter sounds, sorting objects according to sound, making rhymes, forming words, pretending to read and deciphering words etc. so I decided to give him a “structured” activity on alphabets.  Here’s what we have been doing so far:

1. Five in a Row activities that are tied to a letter
2. A letter of the week kind of activity to go along with a holiday or season (letter l and letter a)
3. Reading lots of books
4. After learning a letter, we would read and create his own phonics booklet

During the course of these activities, I observed that he would try to decipher a word, or pretend to create words using sticky tapes, in writing and using our moveable alphabet.  Plus, he knows 90% of the letter sounds (though he's still confused with c and k).  With the signs, I knew he would be ready for the Montessori Pink Series.  And oh boy, it was the best decision I made!

FREE Letter A Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

Last spring Vito and I started to work on letters and letter sounds again (Beginning Letter Phonics Cards and Beginning Reading: Language Objects and Activities).  Because he enjoyed working on these Letter B activity sheets, he always asked for “more” sheets to work on and always repeating “buh for bird” and other b objects.  This led me to create more sheets! And because it’s apple season, I gave him “Aa” and it was perfect!  He worked on all three sheets!  More of this letter A activities but for now, I’m sharing our FREE letter A sheets.

Fall Counting Activities Using Nature’s Objects (FREE Printable)

It’s our favourite time of the year and we are spending more time outdoors observing the change in season and gathering objects from mother nature!   In my Instagram, I’ve been posting pictures of the boys gathering chestnuts, conkers, pine cones and acorn outdoors and bringing them home.  If you’ve been following my blog, we call them “nature finds” and at home, the boys would play with them, mostly exploring the objects (texture, smell and color) and of course, counting how many items they collected.

What You Need to Know About the Early Childhood Montessori Math Materials

I adore Montessori math materials and how it enables the child to experience the true meaning of quantity and numbers.  Montessori math is not just about memorization, counting and abstraction, its main goal is to build a relationship between the child and the materials, learning with ease and enjoying the work through engaging activities.  I own most of the Montessori math early childhood, and starting to collect the elementary for my oldest child.  They’re quite pricey, but worth it. On how to use these materials, I have albums from The Montessori Parent, Cultivating Dharma and Garden of Francis, and I also administer other extension activities that I could think of (I love doing this!).

Montessori Inspired Animal Classification Activities

There’s nothing more interesting for my three years old than learning about animals.  Aside from learning about the continents they live in, my boys also love to identify animals according to their names and classifications.  Initially, Vito can only tell the difference between birds and fish, the rest he calls them “animals”.  So I decided to expand this knowledge further by introducing the other three classifications: mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

Learning How to Use the Montessori Teen Boards

Okay, so your little ones can count up to ten, so what’s next?  In this post, I’m going to show you how the Montessori math method, teaches a child the quantity and number symbols of eleven to nineteen.  There’s a BIG difference being able to “count” from one to twenty or a hundred compared to grasping the concept of what these numbers stand for.  This is where the beauty of Montessori math would stand out, it allows the child to experience the use of materials and its purpose, and once confidence is gained the child can work with the material independently. 

To demonstrate this, here’s our journey of learning the “teens”.

Hands-on Learning on Herbs and Spices

I needed to discard some herbs, but before doing so I decided to whip a sensorial activity with the boys to make use of these scented plants.  I already have Herbs and Spices learning materials from years ago, so the preparation was quite easy.  I also added more spices like turmeric, cumin, black peppercorn, garlic, ginger, and cloves.

Learning How to Use the Montessori Binomial Cube

Vito has perfected the Montessori Binomial Cube and I will be introducing him to the Trinomial cube in a few weeks.  Now, I still have a lot of readers and followers who aren’t aware of this beautiful material and has been asking me to give them further information about this material.  So I prepared this post to all who are interested in learning about this beautiful Montessori sensorial material.

How the Stem Works by Dyeing Flowers

I am so happy to share that we finally get to dye our flowers successfully! Meaning, ALL of the colors were visible unlike before wherein only a few of the colors took effect (red and yellow).    I’ve been wondering on how we can successfully color our flowers, with 100% coverage and we finally did it this time!  By the way, we worked on this activity because I was demonstrating to Vito the function of the stem in a plant. 

FREE TREE Matching Cards Activity

This is a matching and memory game I made for Vito during our Plants and Trees Unit Study.  He absolutely loved this!  I regretted that I didn’t make more, because he kept on asking for more matching games.

Sparkly Planets for your Solar System

We’ve done this before (in 2013) and we made another one again! Creating our planets for our solar system using aluminium foil. Have done this before?  I mentioned the source of this activity in my previous post, read it here.

The Elements of Art: Learning about Lines

It is timely that I get to share how we nurture the artistic side of the kids using Montessori principles.  In this month’s 12 Months More of Montessori Learning, I’m sharing Vito’s current obsession:  drawing!  If you’ve been following me on Instagram, I shared how Vito enjoys making faces of us (Dad, Mom and Mavi).  He just uses lines and dots, a little bit of shading to convey the emotions and faces of his family.  So Mavi suggested if we could teach him how to make different kinds of lines, just like we did before.

FREE Insect Counting Mats

Due to a lot of requests from our readers, I’m sharing our FREE Insect Jars Counting Mats which we used in our Indoor Garden Play Bug Counting Activity.

Top 30 Learning Activities for 3 to 3.5 Years Old

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.

Science Project: How to Make an Erupting Volcano Model

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

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).