Color Mixing Experiment with Baking Soda

We’ve done a lot of color mixing activities in the past to learn about primary and secondary colors.  Last week we worked on color mixing with baking soda and vinegar.  It demonstrated not just the science of “what happens when you mix colors” but it was a great way to entertain kids!

Dinosaur Excavation Activity

I have a spare dinosaur excavation kit which I kept for years, waiting for Vito to be old enough to work on it.  Well, that time finally arrived and I gave it to him so he’ll experience what it’s like to be an archaeologist, even for a day.  Here’s a pretend play of how scientists are able to put up dinosaur bones in the museums!

Animal Kingdom 3 Part Cards and Charts

I am so excited to share these beautiful learning materials I created for my boys.  Mavi, my 9 year old is currently the one using this for school, but Vito ended up using some of the activities as he loves to work on his older brother’s materials too.  So this is our Animal Kingdom Cards and Charts set.  The main objective of this material is to introduce the different classifications/groups of animals to your child.  We have an older version of this, and you can check it out here (Kingdoms of Life: Animal Kingdom) if you are interested.  Anyway, allow me to discuss some of the highlights of this learning material below, so you can have a better idea of what you will be getting when you purchase this for your child or your school.

Hands-on Learning on the Human Body for Preschoolers

Vito is getting more interested in how his body works, especially that a few months ago, he got sick and I have to discuss some important things to him about his health and body.  With this, I started reading to him some of our body books, explaining what happens to the food that he eats, to the water that he drinks, and why he has blood when he has a cut.

Montessori Inspired Space Themed Learning Activities

We are moving to new things this week as Vito’s interest is starting to be directed more about his body and senses.  For the past few weeks, we’ve been doing work about the moon, the planets, and space.  Here’s a roundup of our activities in learning about the solar system and space in general (in no particular order).

Hands-on Learning of Constellations for Preschoolers

Vito and I were exploring constellations earlier this week as we were reading about the Big Dipper.  He was fascinated that I extended our activity into pin poking to recreate the formation of the stars (constellations).

Phases of the Moon Learning Pack

The changing of the moon’s shape has fascinated Vito.  Early this year, we’ve been seeing the moon as early as 1 pm in the afternoon, so he gets to identify and describe its shape.  He would call the shapes “small moon”, “half moon”, and “circle moon”.  With the knowledge that the moon changes its appearance, I read a few books to Vito to explain why this is happening.

Now, this post contains some of the activities we did to learn about the moon phases.  These are hands-on activities, and we used most of our printed materials from my shop.  Continue reading the post to learn more about it.

Types of Clouds for Preschoolers

I mentioned in my Instagram account that Vito is very much interested about the weather lately, and to be specific, he loves learning about clouds.  It all started when we were reading National Geographic Kids Weather book every night.  From here, he started to identify the clouds whenever we are outdoors, whether its a rainy, fluffy, or clear clouds (his own vocabulary).  So while he is still enthusiastic about it, I decided to throw a simple and not so original cloud activity.  Again, I worked on this activity with Mavi when he was 3 years old, and I am happy to do it again with Vito.

Learning The Human Skeleton for Preschoolers

We’ve been singing a lot of Halloween songs at home lately and Vito was fascinated with the Skeleton Dance song.  I decided to give him some activities on skeletons just like what Mavi and I did years ago (The Skeletal System).

Hands-on Learning on Animal Habitats for Preschool

Last week, Vito and I revisited world biomes and animal habitats as we were talking about the fact that not all places in the world have forest whose leaves turn into yellow or orange.  This discussion led to a series of presentation of the world’s biome like desert, rainforest, taiga etc. Our printable from the shop was very handy when I presented this Vito because of the pictures, and he was very interested on the animals living on each biome.

First Great Lesson (4): Study of Elements and the Periodic Table

A few weeks before our vacation, the kids and I worked on the periodic table.  We did this years ago, and Mavi was so excited to work on this activity again.  This is a continuation of our Great Lessons, and if you are new to this post, you can revisit the first and second part of the activities here:  (1) Experiments on the Laws of the Universe and (2) The Volcano

Montessori Weather 3 Part Cards

Few weeks ago, I introduced Vito to some weather types because we were experiencing extreme weather conditions in one day.  I mentioned in my Instagram post that we even experienced hail during the early weeks of summer! Talking about the weather cards, here are the materials I prepared for him:  Weather Cards from my shop, Weather book from National Geographic and The Weather from My First Discovery book.  The booklet you see in the photo is from our Weather Cards set.  The books here are really good and we would read it mostly at night but sometimes Vito would remove them from basket and would skim them to check out the pictures or pretend to read it (mimicking my reading).

The first time I talked about the weather with Vito was here, the activity was very simple, but he learned a lot from this.  We are still using this chart up to now!

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. 

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.

First Great Lesson: Experiments on the Laws of the Universe

It’s that time of the year in our home wherein we're doing "The Great Lessons". Maria Montessori’s plan for the framework of elementary education is cosmic education and cosmic education is attained via telling the five great stories and followed by key lessons. These stories are typically told in the beginning of the Montessori school year for lower elementary and repeated ever year. This is our second year of the great lessons and I decided to document it so you can replicate it in your homes as well.

Montessori For Everyone has a beautiful summary of what The "Five Great Lessons" are all about. This post is all about the First Great Lesson: The Beginning, and we'll showcase the experiments to demonstrate the basic laws governing our universe.

Montessori Inspired Study of Snails for Preschoolers

We’ve been getting a lot of morning showers which resulted in a bunch of snails popping up everywhere.  Vito is loving it, now that he’s older, he’s enjoying the sight of these little fellows.  One time, we caught one sticking out my husband’s car.  Vito was excited!  I made Vito watch as I removed the snail from the car, placed it in our disposable plastic container and brought it inside for him to observe (and explore). 

Learning About Farm Families

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. 

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Montessori Inspired Layers of the Ocean for Preschoolers

Vito is 40 months old.

Moving on to learning about the ocean for Earth Day, I’ve set up this activity tray to demonstrate to the boys that the ocean has many layers and that it is mostly represented by the darkness and lightness of the color blue. In the set-up, the layers are represented by the bottles, from the layer where there is sunlight to the part where there’s none at all.  We are using the book About the Ocean by Cathryn Sill to help us explore the different animals in the ocean.  Since this activity is intended for Vito (but Mavi was also participating), I didn’t focus much on the names of each layer since he can’t read yet, our activity was more on introducing the concept and for familiarity.

Animal Habitats Sorting and Activity Sheets

Vito is 40 months old.

If you read my post on the 12 Months More of Montessori for Earth Science, Vito and I will be working on animal habitats.  We tried this before, in its simplest form when Vito was still a toddler and I decided to move forward into a more abstract approach (with some sensorial activity) now that Vito is older.  In this post, I’m going to share the learning materials which the boys are using and the books to go along with our activities.

Montessori Inspired Parts of a Flower Activities

This midterm break (for Mavi), I’m trying to setup activities that both of the boys (3 and 8 years old) can participate in.  One of which is learning about flowers and what they are made of.  Now, even though Mavi has done this a lot of times already (when he was 4, when he was 6) , he’s still eager to do this activity with his little brother.  This is something new for me though, doing the activity with two boys, making sure that it is engaging to the little one, but at the same time able to relay information to my 8 years old.  Anyway, you can skim through the post to see how I made the boys work together in the activities I prepared for them.