I am thankful for...

... the answered prayers.

... God's blessings we have received and yet to receive

... my mother who's with us right now

... a loving and supportive husband, my prince, my guiding star

... my 5 yrs old Mavi who rocked my world and turned my world upside down (in a good way)

... my 3 weeks old Zaev, who made me a morning person once again

and

... for old and new friends and fans (Facebook, Blogger and Pinterest) whom I met here remotely in the world wide web.  I have so much respect to all of you because of the inspiration you all have given me. 

Thank you!

Happy thanksgiving!

Artist Study: Frida Kahlo

Since we're having a Mexican Unit, I have been itching to tie in an artist that would go with our study.  And by no brainer, we had Frida Kahlo. 

Frida is a very famous Mexican artist who lived a very interesting yet sad life.  She's in pain because of the unfortunate events that happened in her life and one of which is having a vehicular accident.  Because of this, she stayed in the hospital for a long time.  To make herself happy, she painted.  She loves to paint self-portraits with things that would make her happy.

I wanted to delve deeper into the life of Frida but my knowledge of her is very limited.  Maybe when I have the luxury of time, I might as well spend it reading the life of famous artist so I can accurately relay the information to Mavi.  He loves learning about the lives of other people and how it reflects on their works.

Moving on... we started by looking at self-portraits of Frida from the web after which I made these portraits for us to work on.

Using an oil pastel, Mavi put colors on Frida's portrait according to his liking.

 

 

Then he made a self portrait.  He drew his face as I described it to him. He invested too much effort on this one!

"Mom! We should put this in the library!"

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

MEXICO, the place you thought you knew

It is so hard to to have after "school" activities lately as it gets dark early in the afternoon. Mavi would ask me why we're doing school in the evening when in fact it is just three in the afternoon.  Though we still have a lot of things to cover up before the year ends I'm not letting  myself stress out and be pressured of my "to dos".  As I always say, the journey of our schooling at home is all about the experience and fun that we have NOT entirely about the output.

Okay, enough ranting.  This post is all about our Mexico Unit which we started last week.  The materials that we used in this unit are the following:

• Flags of North America
• Flags of Australia/Oceania
• My Adventure Book (North America Edition)  (read about it here)

We started with flags.  We review the countries that we have studied so far and compare them.  As you can see we work on the 3 part cards, and country-capital city matching cards.  These are all included in the printables mentioned above.

 

We talked about the colors used in the Mexican flag, and Mavi discovered that Australia and the United States uses the red color as well! So we discuss the meaning of the red color (and why it is always used in flags) and the green color and what it means to the history of Mexico.

Aside from coloring, we made a Mexican flag similar to this project. We used tissue paper and a cardstock.

 

Mavi made an eagle at the center of the flag representing the coat of arms of Mexico.

Moving on... we also worked on the biomes of Mexico.  We did this with Australia, and I decided that we should try a different approach this time. 

We made a map of Mexcio (biomes) using PlayDoh. We use yellow for desert and light green for deciduous and tropical rainforest (I can't find a darker shade of green to represent the tropical rainforest).  Our maps (left) and Mavi's (right) show below.

 

And we added plants, animals and landmarks found in Mexico.

And that's it for now. I'll be posting a second part of our study as I don't want this post to end up like a novel LOL.

For more FREEbies and learning aids, please check The Pinay Homeschooler Shop and Downloads.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!
All and things beautiful: history geography

Intro to Decanomial Beads

Finally, my Decanomial beads has arrived!  This is the first Montessori materials I purchased and it's so worth it.  Son loved it immediately. Actually, if you've been following my blog, I have a few homemade beads.  But the problem is that I don't have enough and don't have the storage box. 

Now that I own this set we can do a lot of Montessori math :)  And the box really comes in handy.

The first thing we tried was the Snake Game.  I am using Karen Tyler's Math album for this one but you can read about the mechanics of the activity here.

 

Oh we'll be very busy in the next few days :)  We'll use this alongside our study of Mexico and United States.