Introducing Life Cycles to Younger Kids

In our home, springtime brings a renewed focus on the topic of life cycles. As a parent, I am often asked how to introduce the concept of metamorphosis, larva, pupa and more to young children who may not be able to visualize these processes. It is a fascinating subject that is easy to understand. I begin by telling engaging stories that help children understand that just like humans, baby animals come from their mothers and fathers. Some animals start their life as eggs and then undergo a gradual transformation that ultimately leads to adulthood. 

To help explain these concepts more effectively, we use a variety of learning materials that bring these life cycles to life for children. As we follow the "Montessori" philosophy in our homeschool, we prefer to use hands-on learning experiences that allow children to explore and learn in a natural way. Whether it's using specialized learning materials or observing real-life examples in nature, we strive to make learning about life cycles as engaging and interactive as possible.

Learning How to Use the Montessori Binomial Cube

Vito has perfected the Montessori Binomial Cube and I will be introducing him to the Trinomial cube in a few weeks.  Now, I still have a lot of readers and followers who aren’t aware of this beautiful material and has been asking me to give them further information about this material.  So I prepared this post to all who are interested in learning about this beautiful Montessori sensorial material.

Top 30 Learning Activities for 3 to 3.5 Years Old

I created a list of  Vito’s favourite activities starting from 36 months to 3.5 years of age.  I know we’ve had a lot more than 30 but these are his favourite and my top picks as well.  I chose these activities over the rest because he mostly asked for these activities to work on more frequently than others.  He’s more engaged, he learned a lot of vocabulary words and these were the activities where he spent a lot of his time exploring.  So I hope this list will inspire you and give you ideas for things to do with your child around this age.

** Note: Always supervise your child, especially if he/she is handling sharp tools and small objects.

Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant

This is a follow-up activity on our Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant.

After learning about the parts of a plant, Vito and I talked about how plants grow.  We walked around the estate and identified baby plants, some of them were just actually sprouting off the ground and this amazed Vito.  We also read the book How A Seed Grows to go along with our activity, this is a really good book!  The book illustrates the different stages of a plant’s (bean plant) life, from the preparations to planting up to the the part where the grown plant needs to be moved into a ground soil.  We have a few of these Read and Find Out books and Mavi loves to use them as reference.  Anyway, aside from the book, I also used the very beautiful Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant from Safari Toob and a homemade life cycle cards (this are now available in my shop, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats).

Montessori Geometric Solids as a Sensorial Material

I would like to introduce one of our favourite Montessori material at home: the geometric solids.  This has been on my bucket list for the longest time and I finally get to own one!  This is totally worth-it!  This material will introduce the child to the 3D objects and shapes, that will later on be helpful in the learning of geometry.  I listed below the progression of activities of the geometric solid intended to guide parents on how to use this material in case you own one or are planning to have one in the future.

Montessori Inspired Insect Activities for Preschoolers

Here’s a summary of our insect activities for the past week.  Most of these materials are old and reused and many of our activities were not planned but are based on Vito's interest because bugs and other tiny creatures appeared earlier than expected.  Hope this post will give you some ideas on learning activities about these creatures!

Hape Domino Set

Have you heard of the Domino Set by I Love Hape?  This toy is just awesome!  I got it early this year to teach Mavi how to strategically design a game, basically a maze made by dominoes.  Now that Vito is older, we decided to share this with Vito so he will learn how use it and enjoy the fun of creating dominos.  And oh boy, this has been Vito’s favourite for the past few days!

  

Beginning Reading: Language Objects and Activities

Language activities are a favourite in the house now as Vito’s interest in reading has peaked.  We are using language objects more often to practise letter sounds through games (aside from sandpaper letters).  These language objects that we have were collected through the years, starting from Mavi’s time and it has been very useful now in Vito’s journey on beginning reading.

What are Insects?

Here’s a simple way of telling whether an animal is an insect:  has 6 legs (with or without wings).  This is something new to Vito, the word “insect”.  He usually calls them with their real names like flies, bees, dragonflies, etc. but is not familiar with their category.  Now, this is the first time that I introduced this concept, so he struggled a little bit until we started counting the legs!

Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of Insects

Vito and I have been talking about insects in the past few days.  I mentioned in my previous post, the current interest on insects was brought about by their sudden appearance.  So far he has encountered quite a few already like garden ants, flies, wasps and bees, and bugs. It’s a shame we haven’t seen grasshoppers and dragonflies here, I used to catch and collect them as a child (back in Asia). Anyway, since our last activity on Farm Families, Vito still loves to learn about mommies, daddies, and babies, thus I introduced the life cycle of insects early on in our activities.  Unlike my past activities with Mavi, this one is very simple and straight forward.

Seen here are the life cycles figures of:  butterfly, bee, ant, and ladybird.

Montessori Inspired Butterfly Coloring Matching Activity

Saw this idea from one of my favourite Instagram account Momducator.  It’s a brilliant idea of using Montessori color tablets (set 3) to match with the butterfly colors of Safari Toobs (Insects, Butterflies, Bulk Bag).  This is a great practise for visual perception, picking the right color combination to match with the butterflies.

Plants versus Animals Sorting Activity

I am so thankful for The Helpful Garden for providing us this printable (saved me a lot of time!).  Of all the plant and animal activities that we have done in the past, I have forgotten this one basic activity for Montessori botany and zoology: identifying plant and animals. 

Indoor Garden Play for Counting Bugs

Vito is 42 months old.

So we are seeing a lot of bugs lately.  Vito is enjoying it!  We do nature walks in the morning to see the honeybees, flies and unidentified flying objects in the field. And we even caught the wasp that went inside the house last week for exploration.  Lately, we would walk our way to Mavi’s school to pick him up.  During these walks, we would count the number of bugs we see in the bushes and trees.  Vito enjoyed it and I thought that we could also do it at home as an extension.  So I made this “garden” setup for him, wherein we will pretend to catch bugs with our tweezers and place the right number in our number cards. 

Food Preparations That A 3 Year Old Can Do

I don’t often share the practical life activities (in the kitchen) of the kids because I seldom take photos of them while working.  Mostly, because they handle some delicate materials and I wanted to give my full attention whenever we work in the kitchen.  Now that Vito is quite adept in this area, I started taking pictures to demonstrate some of the things that he can work on independently.  These are mostly breakfast and snacks preparations.  And because our main meal involves boiling oil or water and meat, only the big brother can participate on this not Vito (3 years old).

Montessori Inspired Study of Snails for Preschoolers

We’ve been getting a lot of morning showers which resulted in a bunch of snails popping up everywhere.  Vito is loving it, now that he’s older, he’s enjoying the sight of these little fellows.  One time, we caught one sticking out my husband’s car.  Vito was excited!  I made Vito watch as I removed the snail from the car, placed it in our disposable plastic container and brought it inside for him to observe (and explore). 

Learning About Farm Families

I shared in my Instagram last week that Vito is obsessed with the concept of “mommy, baby, and daddy” thing.  He would always pair our animal figures into families and do play pretend.  This made me decided to introduce Vito to the farm animal families which I introduced to Mavi a long time ago (Farm Families - FREE Sorting Cards).  There’s a deeper explanation why we teach kids about animal families.  We teach kids to distinguish and describe objects to form them into bigger groups.   Commonly, we group inanimate objects according to their size, shape and color which is an easy task for the child.  But when it comes to real organisms with no definite shape, size and color, it is more difficult to recognize similar characteristics. 

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Montessori Inspired Farm Activities for Preschoolers

It’s going to be an exciting month for Vito as we are learning about the farm and farm animals!  Kids are so fascinated with the farm, probably because of the domestic animals that can easily be identified and the fact that the farm is where we mostly get our food.  Early in life, the kids are educated that the milk comes from the cow, eggs from chicken, wool from sheep and etc.  At first, we visited a few farm animals in the zoo weeks ago.  We pet some goats, chicken, and seen some donkeys and cattle for Vito to experience.  We’ll be visiting a real farm this month too, and hopefully we’ll get to see some real farming work!

Now, for extension work, here are some activities I prepared for Vito at home to learn more about the farm.  We’re starting some of these already and you can see the photos in my Instagram account.  Please follow me there for real time activities!

Magnatiles for Creativity

We love Magnatiles!  If you’re following my Instagram, we used this often times at home during free play.  I hesitated for the longest time before I purchased these amazing magnetic tiles because of the price, but oh boy, they are so worth-it!  Aside from the fact that it has some educational value, it is also an open ended toy which the boys love to use for building castles, houses, forts, cars and just about it anything!  The possibility is endless thus we love it!

Introducing Kids to Construction Tools

If you are like us, who has no means of doing some carpentry work, then this post is for you!  For one thing, my father and his entire family are carpenters.  They make furnitures, build houses and buildings in my home city and I remember spending most of my time during summer vacation in construction sites managed by my grandfather.  This is the reason why at a young age, I know how to use most carpentry materials despite my mom’s warnings.  Sadly those skills weren’t passed to the new generations.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t expose our kids to this simple carpentry work like hammering, using nuts and bolts, drilling and the like.  And of course, with the advent of IKEA, we need to somehow teach them all about DIYs and these basic tools. 

In this post, I’m sharing our learning toys and materials in exposing my 3 years old to some of these construction tools to acquire those basic skills .

FREE Number Symbols for Counting and Number Recognition

Vito is in a sensitive period of numbers and counting. With this, I made him these number symbol cards inspired by my previous activities with Mavi.  Obviously, I couldn’t find our old printables, so I made a new set and I decided to share it with you as FREE DOWNLOAD!