Continent: Antarctica Unit (Arts and Crafts)

Mavi is 41 months old.  Last of the 3-parter post on our Antarctica Unit.  

My was in the food for drawing (which was timely) when we started the activities so it wasn’t that hard to convince him that we will draw the things he sees in our Antarctica pictures.  Then to give him an idea on what to do... I showed him a picture of a child’s art work.  I randomly Googled the picture by the way.

He made mountains and and added oceans.  The glitters were snow.

 

We usually work together... I work beside him.  Here’s what I did.  I know! It’s a work of a child LOL. Obviously I am not an artist (I went to Engineering school)!

My son’s work.  He kept telling me he wants to go Antarctica... he whines about it all the time.

Then there was a time I encouraged him to paint.... I showed him an artwork inspired by Antarctica but he insist that he wanted to paint his letters.  He’s been obsessed with alphabets for 2 years!

Another variation was to use watercolors. 

His painting.

  And this was mine.

And lastly, our penguin crafts.  And cutting is his favorite thing to do here! 

The finish product.  Supposedly, there will be glitters all over... but it was already 8PM :(

And that’s our entire unit Antarctica.  If you haven’t read the first two, here’s the link":  Part 1 and Part 2.

We will be doing Asia: Philippines next, but I still have to prepare my materials.  Hope it’ll be ready by March or April.

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Continent: Antarctica Unit (Math Activities)

Mavi is 41 months old.

This is a continuation of our Antarctica Unit which we started last week.  Here are the math activities to go along with our unity study.

PENGUIN ADDITION

We used Safari Toob Penguins for our addition. The cards that you see were homemade.  It will make the addition game a little more interesting if he has these picture cards(control cards).

Another version of our penguin addition is using the concept of Montessori’s Addition Strip.  I previously used the technique using bear counters and it worked for him.

Later, he started to do it on his own using the control cards.

SKIP COUNTING BY 2’S AND 3’S

We haven’t done this for a long time.  So I decided to revisit it.  I used white and blue beads, pretending that they’re penguin eggs (and candies according to my son).

Here I told my son that the penguins are hungry and needed two candies each.  Once he placed the beads, we started counting by 2’s.  I explained that counting by 2’s means that we start counting from 2 and skip some numbers along the way (thus the 1,3,5,7,9).

Then he wanted to have another set-up.  He said that the penguins want to eat rice!  He gave each penguin 2 rice (LOL) and he started counting by 2’s again. I was surprise that he can do it on his own. I am in awe of how can a little one learn by doing repetitive activities. 

We did the same thing when we counted by 3’s.

And revisited a few activities using these penguin printables from Making Learning Fun.  See how we used these printables here and here.

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Continent Study: Antarctica Unit

Yehey! I was able to kick-off our Antarctica unit last week!  I’ll be sharing the first three days of our unit study, and how we go about on learning the continent.

DAY 1:  WHAT AND WHERE IS ANTARCTICA

I introduced the continent.  We discussed where Antarctica is located and why it’s surrounded with ice.

B4FIAR: Corduroy Part 2

Was inactive for a while due to work loads.  While I was preoccupied with personal stuff, I keep my son busy doing activities while we’re still stuck at home due to freezing temperature outdoor.  So the past few days, we simply continued with our Corduroy unit activities.

Here he is doing the bear craft on his own.  I basically sat there watch him do this thing.  

              

              

We also worked with Read and Spell, which I downloaded from Homeschool Creations.  Since we started with Before FIAR, the read and spell became his all time favorite.

We practiced buttoning using the button snake which I made a few months ago.

Corduroy is a story that deals with emotions as well.  So I got this matching game from Montessori Print Shop and we enjoyed matching each facial expression.  My sad had a great time imitating the pictures :)

Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.23 – 01.27)

To wrap things up for the things we did last week...

Worksheets. We started doing worksheets and I feel so weird having this in our daily routine. Honestly, I think I’m the only one adjusting to this worksheet thingy. Usually we start our day with Montessori activities but now, I we do them right after worksheets or after lunch. 

Alphabets and Math worksheets.

 

Mavi doing good in tracing lines!

We also worked on pattern blocks.

     

Practice coloring skills using dot markers.

Pink Series:  objects and moveable letters.  He loooovess this!  And I am so happy that he’s beginning to read words NOT by familiarity but by blending letter sounds!

Pink Series:  pictures and word cards.  He worked on 4-sets in one sitting!

 

Pink Series:  started word strip this week. 

Before FIAR:  Corduroy.

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B4FIAR: Corduroy by Don Freeman

Our first Before FIAR unit for the year 2012 is Corduroy.  This story has been the focus of our activities since Monday aside from our daily worksheets.  Printables used in the activities below were sourced from:  Homeschool Creations and Homeschool Share.

Learning beginning and ending sounds of objects in the story.  Mavi did very well with his beginning letters ... but still fail to identify some ending sounds.

Sorting objects whether they’re furniture or not.  After this we also roam around the house to identify ‘real life’ furniture.

I introduced for the very first time the concept of less and more using our buttons (we often use these as counters).   It was a good start :)  We’ll be doing more of this as he progress then I can introduce the symbols less than and greater than.

We simply distinguish which is more and less (for now).  We did a couple of rounds and he finally got bored. It didn’t interest him that much.

Another Corduroy math-related activity was counting pennies.  Lisa has to save so she can buy Corduroy and this is exactly what we did here.  We don’t own a piggybank so I just printed this out as well.  This is an addition game, and we used our play money (coins) instead of printing the paper coins that comes with this printable pack. We pretended that I gave him money, and so is his Dad... then he needed to count the total amount of the coins we gave him and see if he can buy his favorite toy from the toy store.

Another math activity was “where’s the button” game.  He arranged the numbers in order for this activity.  I hide the game piece (button) underneath the number and made him guess what number the button is underneath.  I only printed out the ‘teens number so we can practice more of this, since he still gets confused of their names.

 

Patterning activities using printables and buttons.

We painted his favorite toy Thomas the train and asked if he could paint our house :)

Later we painted Corduroy together.

    

We placed the painting inside his room and loves how it resembles the Corduroy in his book.

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