Christmas Themed Activities

Due to my work loads and activities, I’ve been missing here in the blogosphere for quite a while.  It’s a good thing I take pictures though, and organize it weekly in that way I can easily track and document them easily. 

So here are some of the “Christmas” themed activities we did for the past few days, most of which are Montessori related.

Sorting pony beads using a tweezer.  Surprisingly, he finished it without my assistance considering that this is his first time to use a tweezer.

              

Scooping red and green pompoms using a milk powder scoop.

              

Stringing pony beads by colors using pipe cleaners.

              

He finished all of it breezily!

One time I caught him doing this to our hand towel.  I asked him what he’s doing and told me “I’m ironing.  Just like Lola Merlit.” (Lola Merlit means Grandma Merlit) .  This is a surprise because the last time we were home (my parent’s house) was July.  He still remembers what his Grandmother do at home!

 

Peeling foam stickers during our Alpha Christmas Countdown.

I am still on the process of learning how to organize some of these stuff properly.  Currently, I am collecting food coloring so I can create colored pasta and at the same time do some color mixing activities.

Wishing everyone a happy Tuesday!

 

Homeschool Wrap-Up (12.5 – 12.9)

It’s so difficult these days to keep up with blogging!  Since I still work (at home) I always procrastinate updating my blog and would rather playing with the little one.  

Here are the things we did last week.

Instead of doing Advent Calendar, we made letter crafts for our Christmas Countdown.  I talked about it here.

Lots of writing activity.

We talked about polar bears.  This Usborne Beginner’s book has wonderful book about polar bears.  It’s been my son’s favorite since I got it for him. 

 

I also made control cards based on our Arctic Toob for matching game.

For math, I downloaded these penguins activity cards from Making Learning Fun.  Here, Mavi is learning how to measure the temperature by reading the thermometer:)  On the other picture, Mavi is practicing his learning skills by feeding the penguins with “candies”.

              

He worked on his number puzzle.

 

We also did some patterning activities using printables from 2 Teaching Mommies.

 

Aside from reading books and learning to read words using this, we also worked on our Alpha Phonics Boxes... by sorting objects starting with letters ‘dejyjkwvz’.

              

Linked to:

Alpha Christmas Countdown

Since we’re not doing any Advent calendar this year, I was wondering what we could do in the spirit of Advent.  Was doing some research online and I came across this wonderful blog Little Family Fun and learned about her Christmas ABC’s countdown. It was a superb idea! I love it because it’s simple and needs less time of preparation. 

                             

My son and I loves working this project together!

I’m liking this to:  

Art in Letters

My son has difficulty writing lowercase letters.  He loves to write, and every time he does, he uses uppercase letters and wouldn’t want to write the lowercase.  Somehow, he isn’t confident writing it as he gets confused with all the curves and twirls lowercase letters make.

So my target as of this moment is to give him  A LOT of penmanship exercises of lowercase letters aside from our usual Kumon Write and Wipe.  I know that kids his age gets bored of using materials over and over again... so I try to vary my approach so to preserve his interest.  I discovered this from Adventures of Bear...  and as Julie would describe it “the child traces the outline over and over each time with a different color until the template is filled.”

Here’s my son doing letter a to g.  We’re doing one letter at a time, but he keeps asking for more that’s why we reached letter g.  I plan to give 2-3 letters each day if he asks for it.

 

The colors would have been apparent if we used his Crayola Pipsqueaks instead of Crayola crayons  like what we did a few months ago (old blog).  But anyway he enjoyed practicing and we’ll be doing this till we reach letter z.

Homeschool Wrap-Up (11.28 – 12.2)

Sharing pictures of what we did last week (aside from reading books).  We only worked a few activities as to most days, he prefers playing alone... pretending to be Mister Maker. 

LANGUAGE

• We practiced reading of word families for ‘ot’ and ‘ow’
• Identifying beginning and end letters for our CVC words.  This is still part of our Pink Series unit.  I was hoping to wrap this up by the end of 2011 but by the way I I see it, he still has difficulty identifying ending letters.  We will be doing this activity a lot so he can practice learning ending sounds.

                   

SCIENCE

We sort his toys whether they are magnetic or not.  Oh he loved this activity!

              

Then we did the 3-part card for Turtle I bought this from Montessori Print Shop.  Supposedly, this is for our Pond Unit but since I didn’t have much resources to go along with the theme, I just whipped a few turtle-related activities.

              

Learned about the Life Cycle of a Turtle

MATH

Turtle sizing activity. 

Turtle jumping game using number cards.  Here I would tell him whether to jump by 2’s or 3’s or at times, I would just command him to jump to a certain number.  Great way to learn numbers, counting and to have fun using motor skills.

 

I don’t know the name of this game but this is certainly a favorite during parties and get together in the Philippines.  Here, I placed the same Turtle number cards on the floor, then have my son followed my instructions.  Something like:  place your right foot on 4, then have your left foot on top of number 8, place your right hand on 10 etc etc.  When the game was over, this is how he end up on the floor.

                        

It was fun fun fun! He kept asking me that we should play it again! (All turtle cards were downloaded from Confessions of a Homeschooler)

PRACTICAL LIFE

Lots of writing practice using our Kumon lowercase write and wipe

 

Advent project: The Creation

And sorting his toys by beginning letters.  He did this all by himself.

 

Linking this to: