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Animal Classifications

Last week Mavi learned about animal classes.  He’s been playing with his animal figures for weeks and I thought that maybe I could have a little activity that would make use of these animals and learn at the same time.   And it hit me that we haven’t talked about animal classes yet.  All we ever do is sort animals whether they live on land or water, or whether they’re farm or zoo animals. So the thought of having a new activity got me really excited.

So per usual, I went to the library to get some books relating to animal classifications.

I started telling a story about the animal world wherein they are grouped according to their characteristics.  I used the images here to describe each of the class and then we sorted each of the figures whether they are mammals, reptiles, fish, birds or amphibians.

MAMMALS.  (Fur, mommies nurse their young with their milk, four legged and warm blooded)

REPTILES. (Scaly and dry skin, 4 legs or no legs at all, usually lay eggs, cold-blooded)

 

BIRDS. (Feather, 2 legs, lays eggs, warm-blooded)

FISH. (Scales and fins, lay many eggs, live in the water, cold-blooded)

AMPHIBIANS. (Moist smooth skin, live in land and water, lay eggs,webbed feet)

My son had a wonderful time with this activity.  For two days, this is just what we did, he loves sorting his animals.  Then one day, while he was doing free play in his room, I peeked and saw him sorting his animals all by himself :)

 

It felt good to see your son loving the things that you teach him.  So note to self, that the next time we’ll visit the zoo, we’ll play a game of telling what the animal class a certain animal belongs :)

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Math

I’m curious how you guys practice addition at home.  Aside from the usual worksheets, what we do is mostly use our beads and counters to do hands-on addition.  I wanted to gather more ideas because as of now I’m running out of activities as to how I could make “addition” more interesting to him.  Don’t get me wrong, he loves addition.  At times he would randomly play addition using his fingers or spend his free time playing a MATH BINGO app.

I caught him one time playing with the app.  He's the happiest whenever he gets a correct answer.

              

We use beads as follows: 

I handwritten the equations on the writing paper and all he needed to do is follow what’s written on the paper and solve the equation.

 

For the bear counters:

I wrote numerical equations in a notebook and solve the problem using number cards and counters.  He records the answer in the notebook.  Aside from checking if it’s correct or not, I can also check whether he writes the number correctly.  At this time, he still finds it difficult to write number 4 and 5 LOL.

                

  

So this is what we usually do with our Math :)  How about you... any more ideas?

Asia ~ Singapore (our learning materials)

For a while, we lived in Singapore.  While there, we explored some of the famous landmarks, experience the diversity of culture and of course enjoy Asian foods!

As part of our Asian unit study, we reminisce our days in Singapore with these pictures:

My son attended a local school.  He was only 2 yrs old then. They have Chinese lesson in the afternoon and most of his classmates were Chinese.  Here are pictures taken during his 3rd birthday when we celebrated it in school.

Some pictures of our daily life:  our pad, me visiting Chinatown and Mavi playing at the park.

Before we left, we visited the Universal Studios. Despite the head, we had a blast! Too bad we were not able to ride some of the interesting stuff because of the endless queue. 

And we just have to take a picture with the famous Merlion.

Mid this year, a friend sent us some helpful materials to add up to our collections of Singaporean memorablia.  I was so happy since we could use these in our unit study.

Here are some brochures from the three zoos in Singapore: The Rainforest Zoo, Night Safari and the Bird Park.

A booklet of all Singapore “sites to visit” which includes Little India and Chinatown.

 

Postcards!

  

A map of Singapore and the MRT connections.  Oh how I miss these fast trains!  This is how we travel around in the island :)  Singapore is just so small that you can roam around the entire country in one day LOL.  Too bad we didn’t get to visit Malaysia while still there :(

And of course we have paper bills and coins, keychain of a Merlion, stamps, entry tickets to Sentosa and our ezlink card (card accessing trains).

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Artist Study ~ Edgar Degas

We were watching my niece’s ballet recital and I was telling my son that there was once a painter who loves to paint ballerinas.  And out of nowhere, I found myself setting up an Edgar Degas artist study.

Degas is well known for his pictures of racehorses, nudes and of course ballerinas.  He was fascinated with ballet dancers.  He showed them in many poses, not just dancing... but going to classes, chatting, stretching and tying shoes.  He spent hours observing and sketching ballerinas, totally absorbed in his works.  And as he aged, he eyesight worsened so he turned into sculpting.

Using my homemade art cards, we looked into some of Degas’ famous works.

         

Here’s a copy of my Degas art cards.  All images were from Google/Wikipedia. 

Asia ~ India [2]

I chanced upon this book:  Krishna Steals the Butter and Other Stories.  The book retells stories based on Hindu faith, perfect for little kids learning all about Hindu deities and mythical creatures.  My son enjoyed the stories so much that we read it every night. 

I looked around the net for some coloring printables of Hindi deities but I only came up with Ganesha and Rama.

Furthermore, I browsed for some resources, I discovered this wonderful site titled INDO Kids.  It has links to Indian mythical stories, festivities and famous people.  It’s a perfect site for those who wants to learn about India and doesn’t have access to libraries.

Another thing that we did was watch an episode of a local show here (for kids) entitled Let’s Celebrate wherein it showcased the Diwali festival.  The story of Rama and Sita is shown on the video, it’s just a portion of the whole Diwali episode.

We also had fun watching and dancing with these little cuties as we learn how to dance.... in Bollywood style!

And that ends our journey of discovering India.  Oh we had so much fun learning!  You can read the first part of our Indian study here.

Stay tuned as we discover Singapore and Philippines!

 

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Asia ~ India

We had a wonderful time learning important facts about India. Here are some of the materials we used:

Currency (Rupee) which I Googled and printed out, stamps, Fact File similar to China, Indian flag which my son made, a map and a Taj Mahal figure.

 

Books are important learning materials as well and we’re lucky to have lots of great ones at our local library.

We looked for India in the map which I purchased from here.

The pictures that I printed out also helped a lot in understanding the lifestyle, culture and religion of India.  My son is amazed of the many things he has learned!  Like he can tell that Hinduism is for India and Buddhism is for China :)  Then he also wanted to try out eating on the floor, which most of the Indian people practices.  I couldn’t find a mehndi here so I skipped the part of applying artistic patterns on my hand.  We also tried eating “chapatis” (ready made) and dipped it to curry sauce (from my Chicken Curry).

    

We ended our first session by making an Indian flag using our colored papers. He basically did it all by himself :)

     

More of this soon!

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