Montessori Sensorial The Brown Stairs

So I gave in to my desire and bought Vito the brown stairs, and boy oh boy, I didn’t regret it!  Similar to the way he responded to the pink tower, Vito loves and enjoy using our Montessori brown stairs!  I realized that there’s so much more we can do when he used both of the materials, the extension activities are limitless and pattern making is even more challenging!

B4FIAR: Caps for Sale! (with FREE Counting Cards)

Have you read the book Caps for Sale?  It’s one of our all time favourite classic books in the house!  I first heard of it when we were in Singapore, borrowed it from the library and Mavi immediately loved it.  Because I love the idea of Five in a Row, I decided to purchase the book so that we can do extension activities over and over again with the book.  Now that it’s Vito’s turn, I decided to prepare simple activities to go along with book that are centered around the three objects found in the book:  caps, money and monkeys.

Animal Habitats Sorting and Activity Sheets

Vito is 40 months old.

If you read my post on the 12 Months More of Montessori for Earth Science, Vito and I will be working on animal habitats.  We tried this before, in its simplest form when Vito was still a toddler and I decided to move forward into a more abstract approach (with some sensorial activity) now that Vito is older.  In this post, I’m going to share the learning materials which the boys are using and the books to go along with our activities.

Teaching Land and Water Forms to Preschoolers Through Play

Vito is 40 months old.

In line with our Earth Science activities, I decided to introduce Vito to land and water forms using the Montessori Sandpaper Land & Water Form Cards and the Safari Toob vehicles (Safari Ltd On the Road TOOB, Safari Ltd In The Sky TOOB, Safari Ltd In The Water TOOB).  I came up with this idea because a few weeks ago, Vito was really hooked with our land, water, and air transportation figures from Safari Toobs.

Montessori Inspired Phonics Mystery Bag Game

Vito is 40 months old.

I’m always in search of new learning games and activities to try with Vito.  Vito is quite a challenge.  He’s a little bit picky with activities, he always wants it to be interesting, some sort of a game.  He is currently in a sensitive period with letters, always singing the song, identifying letters in books, pretending to read words, completing his alphabet puzzles and more.  He knows the letter sounds and can identify uppercase and lowercase, so I’m moving forward to phonics and CVC reading practise in our language activities at home.  To start with, we are practising how to identify beginning letter sounds of “objects” in picture format.  I know, I should be doing objects, but Vito is always distracted with objects.  He sees them as toys, not as language learning materials. We don’t get things done whenever I use objects because we end up playing.  So I’m sticking with picture cards for now, it’s working on his part.  Whenever he sees a picture card, he would name it and emphasize the beginning letter sound.  This was our first try, and we’ve been doing this activity occasionally.  Lately, I acquired an extra tiny bag from my Stereognostic material and I made use of it in this game.  We often use moveable alphabet but Vito insisted to use the Hape Uppercase Puzzle (he loves this puzzle!).

Montessori Inspired Activities for Earth Science

I am so excited to share our activity trays for Earth Day! This is in line with our 12 Months More of Montessori Series wherein we are focusing on Earth Science.  In this post, I gathered a few topics related to Earth Science, assembled them into tray activities that’s suitable for preschoolers from ages 3 years and older.  Hope you enjoy our activities for the coming weeks!

Flags of the World

Earlier this year I bought Mavi this Montessori Map and Flags because they’ve been having a lot of geography lessons in school and he wanted to master his knowledge of flags.  As it turned out, this has been one of the most used Montessori material at home as of the moment.  There are 32 country flags with a stand.  Mavi can mostly identify those of European and American countries, but he needs to review his African and middle eastern countries.

Montessori Inspired March Activities for Preschoolers

With Vito’s current obsession with letters, I’m focusing on letter recognition, phonics and writing from hereon.  Our homeschool activities in March are mostly revisiting past activities and doing a lot of extensions. Check the details below to know more about it:

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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Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.16 – 01.20)

Last week’s activities includes:

A unit study on Plants and Flowers

Read about our entire unit here (part 1) and here for part 2.

Practice writing and coloring using worksheets.

I was surprise how much he has improved with coloring even if we haven’t done it for quite a while now. 

Though my son is obsessive with alphabets... tracing letters is not his liking :(

And we also work on some math workbooks (this was given to me by a friend back home).

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More Plants and Flower Activities

Supplemental activities for our Plants and Flower theme:

We discussed how buds became flowers.

  

Flower puzzle and while completing it, we discussed the different parts by placing the labels on the correct parts.

This is how it looked like when he completed it.  My bad, I didn’t have any guide/control cards so I I guided him a little where to put the exact location of the stamens.  Though there’s an outline provided on the paper as his guide. 

     

Other activities include reading books and looking at different types of flowers.  Then we replicate those flowers using our art papers.  He was fascinated with the different shapes and colors of the flower.   

Practicing pincer grasp by pin pricking the flower shape.  This is his first time to do such an activity and wasn’t into it.  And he doesn’t want to prick on the outline... he’s more interested pricking on the spaces :)

With our “plant” theme... we walked around the estate and discussed the different type of plants that he sees.  And we took a sample of each part (except for the roots)... from flowers to stem. We brought it at home and identified each one juxtaposed the Plants Nomenclature card which I purchased from MPS.

See him in action doing the plant’s 3-part cards, paper crafts, coloring the parts of a plant and discussing the life cycle of a plant via a book which was given to him by hi godparents.

Well... ‘twas an activity my son truly enjoyed.  Hopefully, we can revisit this theme by Spring or Summer :)

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Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.6 - 01.13)

An overdue post due to lots of work. 

Color mixing

              

With the use of medicine dropper and food coloring.  He attempted to paint a car (left picture) using the his mixes.

 

Pink Series

We’ve been doing this almost every day.  Currently we’re doing the ‘objects and moveable letters’ and ‘objects and cards’.  Next week we’ll be doing the abstract version, that’s using picture cards instead of objects.  After which we also work on the worksheets for the Pink Series: beginning and ending sounds.

Since I don’t have a printer, I just wrote these beginning and ending letters on a cardstock, covered it with a contact paper (I don’t own a laminator) and made him use a dry erase pen.  This way, we can always reuse our worksheets.

In case you want to know, here are objects for the Pink Series.

 

Math

We learned about time and how to read it.  See my post here.

Then also had Addition for our Math. The concept here is similar to that of Montessori’s Addition Strip Board but instead we used blue and red bear counters.  I plant to make another set using printed materials whenever my son progresses fromthis.

        

Painting

We do this almost everyday.  He also request for his paints until we ran out of it :(

Botany:  PLANTS AND FLOWERS

This week, we jumpstart our Plants and Flowers activities.  Read about it here.

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