Artist Study: Vincent Van Gogh

We're doing Vincent Van Gogh this week.  I plan to give "art lesson" every week till the school starts to keep the little one busy as we decided not to let him join Summer Camp this year. 

We have this wonderful book as our reference.

First project:  painting Sunflowers like Van Gogh

Learning how to use big brushes for backgrounds and we talked about the different "strokes" in painting.

 

Here as seen on the picture below, I let him talk about the colors Van Gogh used in his painting.

 

For painting objects, we used small brushes.

  

 

His and hers :)

              

Linking to:

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Animal Figures and Cards

Oh how much my son loves these!!  He loves to sort all our figures according to continents or arrange them alphabetically.  Now I made these pocket containers for my continent cards (animals) according to their Montessori color code. 

I got my figures from Safari Toobs and  Schleich .  I place everything on a basket and my son would just sort them accordingly.

Here's how they look like, showing 5 animals per continent.

 

 

 

 

Each continent set has 11 animals on it and my mission this year is to complete my figures so I can have all the animals representing each continent. 

Continent animal cards and other FREEbies are available at Pinay Homeschooler Shop and Downloads.

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Botany Unit: Seed

Because is school is finally over and we're enjoying days of cuddling and story telling, I almost forgot to post our Seed Unit.

So here are my materials: Seed Nomenclature cards and Booklet, mung seed sprouts and other sample of seeds.

First we made mung beans sprout.  This is an excellent way of showing little ones how beans turn into plants.

 

We "harvest" the sprout and dissected it.  The only problem with mung beans is that they're so tiny!

  The 3 part cards.  I have to say that we've been doing nomenclature cards for 3 yrs and it helped a lot in my Mavi's reading.

 

Matching seeds.  The containers are from a Beauty Travel Kit which I got from a Euro store.

Now how I wish they all looked different! LOL. 

Mavi was so happy when he saw the little leaf inside the bean.  A perfect way to show him the epicotyl (embryonic shoot).

Introduction to dicots and monocots.  This is an quite advance topic and I know it will be hard for him to grasp the idea as of the moment. So I just showed him that the mung beans are dicots because it has 2 cotyledons.  To demonstrate, I made him dissect the beans and he said "Oh yes, there's two of them!".

 

Worksheets.  This is his favorite part.  He loves coloring and writing the the labels of each part.  These sheets are included in The Seed Pack.

And that's how we go about our Seed Unit :)  As of the moment, we're on a homeschool-break... you know just doing random stuff at home like painting, arts and crafts, legos and watching kid-friend movies and animation.  Next week we'll have Ocean and Marine Animals.

For more materials and FREEbies, please visit my Pinay Homeschooler Shop and Downloads.

Linking to:

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Botany Unit: Trees and Leaves

Last week's activities. Sorry if I have to flood this post with pictures as I am short on words.

Trees in 4 Seasons

We made these wonderful trees last week and I think it deserves a post!

Materials needed:  some colored tissue paper and 4 tree trunks (cut-out from paper bags)

 

Cut the tissue paper into small pieces and crumple each.  For the trunks, glue them on a white paper or cardstock.  You might work on one tree at a time.  Such as here, we started with summer... thus the green tissue.  I also advice to use some range from light to dark colors for some accent.  My son had fun gluing the leaves on the trees!

 

Here's our winter and spring trees.  My son decorated the winter tree with some "snowy leaves" on the ground and leaving the tree almost bare.  Our spring tree is a Cherry Blossom thus the color pink.

 

For summer, we have light and dark green leaves and for autumn he wanted yellow and orange with leaves on the ground.

 

And this is how they turned out... and I love it! They all look good together!  I'll find a suitable frame for them so I could hang and display them in sitting room:)

 

Linking to:

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Worksheets Again

I was doing some "spring cleaning" and was organizing my files the other day and my son saw old worksheets that he's been working on last year.  We stopped doing worksheets because there was a point that he's no longer interested in it and the fact that he doesn't like worksheets.

I was surprised because when he saw these sheets, he excitedly asked me if he can work on it. 

So this is what we're doing when we're taking a break from our Botany lessons.  I don't know how long this will last but as long as he wanted to work on them, I have to include it in our "afterschool" activities (and a good thing to do on rainy day!) . 

Montessori Addition Charts (FREE Addition Booklets!)

My son is enjoying the FREE Addition Charts which I got from Hope4Me.  He is using the Addition chart with the Addition Tables Booklet 1 which is also FREE and can be downloaded here.

Animals Around the World

Finally! All files are up now and you can purchase materials for Antarctica, Australia/Oceania, Asia and Africa.  Here's the link to all of my animals around the world file. (Click the pictures for the link)

Animals of Antarctica

 

Animals of Africa

 

Animals of Asia

Animals of Australia

 

Animals of Europe

 

Animals of North America

 

Animals of South America

 

And for my FREEBIES you can check it out here.  I am currently working on a page listing all of my freebies and archiving all those with prices for easier access.  So I'm asking for your patience and understanding... it will be up soon and you can view the freebies and those with prices in one click. 

Thank you soooo much everyone! Hope you are liking all of these!

Happy happy Father's Day weekend to all!

Botany Unit: Plant Life Cycle and Photosynthesis

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

To wrap up our Plant Study, we looked into the process of Photosynthesis.  We talked about the source of light, the water and the carbon dioxide that the plant needed to produce oxygen.

I printed a few worksheets from Education.com for him to work on.      

Here's a helpful animation about Photosynthesis.

LIFE CYCLE OF A PLANT

Another worksheet from Education.com, here ordering the stages of a plant's life.

               

 EXPERIMENT

To see how the fluids move inside the plant, we did a little experiment.  We put some stalks of celery into a glass of water containing a blue food coloring.

              

The results as of Day 1.  The leaves and the tip of the stalks have blue spots and the leaves turned into blue.  That's because the blue water has been transported around the plants :)  I love how visible the blue pigments are in the leaves!  (You can click the pictures for a much bigger image)

              

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
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Preschool Corner
Spring Carnival

FREE Addition Table Booklets

I made these for my son for use in our addition exercises.  We're currently using Book 1.