8 Christmas Tray Activities for Kids

We are currently sick (Vito and I), but the good news is Vito is on his way to recovery (antibiotics) while I’m still suffering from cough and flu.  Though I don’t have any fever but I don’t feel like doing anything at all, just wanted to lie down, sleep or just relaxing my mind from anything. For me to be able to rest and recover, I decided to come up with Christmas tray activities for Vito to work independently with minimal supervision. 

Montessori Inspired Vegetable Activities for Kids (Part 1)

We are all currently sick (since the weekend), we are battling cough and flu.  We spend our days resting, basically just sitting around doing random things like reading books, playing with toys or watch the kids’ favourite TV shows.  Because I was able to do some groceries last weekend, I decided to whip a vegetable activities for the boys yesterday using the ones I bought from the store.  My aim for these activities is to introduce healthy foods to the kids for fast recovery (from our sickness) and healthy diet.   The cards are from my shop and both of my kids love it!

Learning About Fruits and Vegetables for Preschoolers

Vito is 36 months old.

These fruits and vegetables cards were taken out of the storage box and has been used ever since.  It’s been used for naming and identifying fruits and vegetables and also served as matching cards.

November Activities for Preschoolers

Last week, Vito refused to do any of our language activities, so we worked mostly on practical life, counting, sorting and storytelling. He also started walking to Mavi’s school (no buggy!) despite that it’s a 30 to 45 minutes walk round trip.  This lessens our time for “preschool” in the morning since we have to leave early.

Wooden Counting Pyramid Puzzle from Beleduc

I guess by now you know that I am a HUGE fan of Beleduc, a toy company in Germany that produces beautiful educational materials for kids.  The boys love our Beleduc puzzles and we always use them.  You’ve seen us using our Body Puzzle and Pumpkin Life Cycle in the blog lately. And look what I discovered recently… it’s a wooden puzzle pyramid used for counting!

Language Lessons for Preschoolers: RAMFBITG

Vito is 36 months old.

Vito is currently working hard learning his letters, sounds, and expanding his vocabulary. Due to weather constraint we are mostly stuck at home, therefore the lack of outdoor nature studies. So our mornings are mostly spent for his “homeschool”.  We are busy reading books, learning letters, doing writing, and practical life activities.

In this post, I would like to share Vito’s language lessons which you can try in your homes as well.  Remember my post on booklets?  I mentioned in the post that at home we’re learning letters and their sounds in groups (color coded).  First group is RAMF-BITG, second is CUSN-POLH and lastly DEXQY-WXZKVJ.  This idea came from My Montessori Journey, one of my favourite blogs dated back in 2010.  Read more about this grouping here.

Early Literacy with Beginning Letter Sound BINGO Game

Vito is 36 months old.

Hello everyone! It’s been awhile!  We’re having minor fixes at home thus, the lack of updates and posts.  But I am so happy to say, that Vito is FINALLY interested with letters! He’s currently showing eagerness in learning how to write and read letters.  You can check our updates and photos in my Instagram account.  So expect A LOT of letter/phonics/reading activities in the coming days… and months from us!

To start with, we played a BINGO game early this week and I was so happy that Vito loved and enjoyed it!

Counting Numbers 0 to 9

Mavi is 36 months old.

(September 26, 2011)

We’re back in practicing serious counting and number identification. 

The activity let the child learns numerals, amounts and how to match amounts with numerals (1:1 correspondence).

I am using the “identification-recognition-recall” mechanics of Montessori which is known as the 3-lesson period.  This site gives a clear explanation of how this 3-lesson period works.

Working with Numbers 0 to 4.

We started with play coins. 

I let him identify the numerals first, and I would say “let’s put the x(representing the numeral) number of coins in the grid”.  As I place the coin/s in the grid, I let my son count with me.

After I have placed the coins from 1 to 4, I would ask him “where is 3? where is the 0?” .  Then to end our 3-lesson period, we recalled each number of coins in the activity. 

My son participated well in this activity.  I was surprise that he’s beginning to have longer attention span.  After my presentation I let him do the activity by himself:  he placed the correct number of coins according to the number it represented.

Since he wanted to do more, we did other variations by using two more objects:  the beads and the popsicle sticks.

Basically, we just performed the same 3-lesson period as we did previously with the coins.

He’s always in deep concentration when he works.  I grabbed the opportunity to take photos while he’s busy.

This is how it looks using colored popsicle sticks.

 

Working with Numbers 5 to 9

 

Similar procedure on what we did with numbers 0 to 4, we practiced counting 5 to 9 as well.

That’s Mavi placing the appropriate number of coins to the grid.

He did very well with the beads :)  (Our 8 aka brown beads is a little shorter because it is made of smaller beads.  I didn’t find any brown beads of the same size as the rest)

Counting popsicle sticks. It came to a point where the sticks won’t fit on the space allotted to number six so he placed the rest below number 7 hehe. 

You can vary different objects or counters for this activity. Lakeshore Learning has a wide variety of math counters, but I find them quite pricey.  My playmoney is around 60PHP which I got from a thrift shop in Singapore as well as the craft popsicle sticks.  You can also you use erasers, cupcake topping designs, pebbles, flat marbles and much much more!

Phonics Search and Sort

We did Alpha Phonics Object box this week.  And for this activity, I just dumped everything (objects) on a box and had my son search for the objects that starts with letters R-A-M-F-B-I-T-G and sort them.

I love how he concentrates on this.

Here’s our object box.  I like it that I made it this way, mix everything and allow him to search.  It’s like playing a treasure hunt!

 

For the sorting, I placed four different colored construction papers on the table and made him arrange the uppercase and lowercase “ramf” letters.

The result of his work: 

      

After “ramf”, he asked if we could do more.  So I made him search for objects starting with letters “bitg”.

      

This is what my son came up with letters “bitg”.

      

B4FIAR: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen

Mavi is 36 months old.

My son picked We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen as our next unit for B4FIAR.  And since I realized that the subject here is on bears, I find it wise to row Blueberries for Sal at the same time.  So we’ve been reading these books everyday, and singing Rosen’s bear hunt song at the same time.  But the focus of this week’s activities is on We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.

STORY SEQUENCING.

A wonderful activity that we truly enjoyed.  Read about it here.

Then we further explored the book by doing our very own bear hunt activity.  I posted it here.

 

MATH.  We did two versions of bear counting. The first was inspired by this post.  I love how they practiced counting and color sorting at the same time.

Then we also had our version of cards and counters (bears) but instead of using a number symbol, I used a hand symbol to indicate the number of bears to be counted.  Surprisingly, my son can recognize what number the hand signifies by just looking at it :)

 

I also made some pattern matching printables to go with our unit study.  Here, Mavi has to matched the patterns.

We studied animal tracks and played the matching game.  I got the file that I printed out from here.

I wanted to demonstrate what is animal track and how they differ from one another so I made use of our playdough and some of his animal figures for this.   Happily, each animal figures produced different tracks.

He enjoyed making tracks and this animal track activities.  He keeps asking for it for several days.

LANGUAGE.

Using the B4FIAR packs I downloaded from Homeschool Creations, we build, spell and read words

He easily build the word “mud”.

But with words with composed of more than 5 letters, he would at times miss the correct order of the letters.

Then there’s the clipcards for practicing beginning letter sounds.

 

SCIENCE.

The subject for this unit is bear, so I was happy to get hold of the brown bear book from our library.  It basically consist of everything that you need to know about this massive creature.  This book was very informative.  It first started describing the different parts of the bear, then goes to describe the bear habitat and youngs, how they search for their food, how they sleep and how they play. 

I looovee this book.  It has wonderful pictures that my son can clearly visualize what a real bear looks like.  I hope I own the whole series.

I downloaded worksheets from Kidzone and First School for our bear study and writing practice.

PRACTICAL LIFE.

We did a bunch of cutting activities.  I made use of our old magazines instead of printing a cutting strip. 

First, I made a guide for him to cut that is by marking the borders of the picture in the magazine as shown above.  Then he has to cut the picture using that guide.  So far, he liked this idea of cutting magazines and with lines.

Then he asked to cut more.  And told me that he wants to make the guide this time.

Mavi tracing the brown the bear.  He didn’t color it though.

The worksheet from First School.

Working on the pre-writing sheets that comes with the pack.

          

PLAY PRETEND.

He wanted to experience being  a bear. So I made him claws which he really really love!  Then he looked at the picture of the brown bear from this book and told me he should also have a brown face, so I made him a brown mask as well.

Well I just thought that these pictures were so funny.  He tried to growl like the bear and keep roaming around the house scaring me and his Dad :) Precious.

And that’s what we did for our We’re Going on a Bear Hunt unit.  Hope it inspire and entertained you :)

B4FIAR: Bear Hunt Story Sequencing

It took my son weeks to get over the We’re Going on a Bear Hunt book.  He love it even more when he saw Michael Rosen’s video version. He’s been singing it 24/7! The very first thing that we did for the B4FIAR unit was to sequence the story in the book. 

First we read the book together.  Then we read it the second time, but as we do I would pause and ask him what was the first thing that the family encountered as they hunt for the bear, then what happened next and so on. My son would get confused between the mud, forest and snowstorm, but he can clearly describe each event.  Say, instead of saying ‘mud’, he’ll give me the “thick oozy mud”. 

 

Surprisingly, he can match the description with the picture.  But of course, we’ve been doing this activity for quite sometime now and he must have memorize it already.

The second time we did the activity (he asked for it!), I made each picture an a object to make it more “realistic”.  As seen on the pictures below, I made a grass, river, mud and cave out of construction paper.  The snowstorm, I added bits of styrofoam on the picture representing snow and for the forest, I made trees out of pipe-cleaners and construction papers.

      

Boy oh boy! He looooveed this bear hunt world!

And I was really touched when he told me that there should be a family.  He said "Mama, where’s the family?”  So I made him a picture of a family.  In the picture I was the only one who’s not wearing a hat, so he insisted that I should also wear a hat.  I told him I cannot wear a hat, but he want it so badly that he added a hat on my picture, as you can see below.

                        

And he positioned everything, including our miniature bear.  Oh he was so delighted!

That night, he displayed his work on the window to preserve it for his Daddy to see.

I will be posting more bear hunt activities.  So stay tuned! 

P.S.  I do not own these printables.  I’ve downloaded this story sequence printable a long long time ago and I forgot the source.  If ever you own this or came across the source, please do let me so I can add credits to this post.