[REPOST] Continent: Australia

EDIT: Thank you so much to my reader Tracy for pointing out incorrect details of my animals. I have already corrected it and updated the link. Caiman doesn't exist in Australia.. and it's actually a mistake. It's supposedly crocodile but I got confused with my animal figures :( And all the while, I thought BBQ ribs originates from Australia and they actually think of it as American food! Thank you so much! I am so happy to learn all of these as well.

My family will be on vacation in the next few days and I have been cramming these days due to preparations. Aside from that we spend most of our days outdoors because of football practice, thus the lack of updates and post.

Last week, we worked on Continents, and the subject was Australia.  Was very happy that I found these books from the library.   My son loved the books for they had a lot of photos that made an impact on my son.  The books provided pictures of the people and the culture of Australia, which was very very important in our unit lesson.

Now the materials I made were:  the maps, flags, postcards and stamps.   I also skipped printing the currency  because my son isn’t interested with it at the moment.

My son also created the Australian flag out of cardstock (with a little assistance from me).  He knows by heart the number of stars on the flag LOL.

I printed cards for the landmarks and foods in Australia.  We were supposed to make Pavlova, but since we’re not really a fan of sweets and pastries, I rejected the thought of making it in order to save time and money :)  Instead, we made BBQ ribs!!

Then he started drawing each cards.  Can you guess each of it?  There’s an alligator(caiman), the boat in the Sydney Opera House, the Cockatoo, a Dingo and an Emu.

Also, I made control cards for the animals in the Safari Toob Down Under for matching game.  You can download it from here.   Images were googled and if you wish to share it, kindly redirect them to  my blog or on this post for the link.  Thank you!

We plot the animals on the map where they’re mostly seen in Australia.

   

And to complete our unit lesson, I purchased the Kangaroo Nomenclature Card from Montessori Print Shop. 

The next time we do Australia, I promise to add more materials and age appropriate activities.  For now, I think these are okay :)

Linking to:

B4FIAR: Ask Mr. Bear

A few weeks ago, we rowed Ask Mr Bear and pull out a Farm Animals themed as well. My son loves this book to pieces and he can almost memorize it.  There were times I can here him do a monologue using his animal figures (Safari Toobs) basing on the story.  
Here are some pictures that best describes the activities we did to go along with the book.

Story sequencing. To make it more interesting I added the objects the animals offered to Danny as a gift for his Mom.  This printable was downloaded from Homeschool Creations.

Identifying beginning sounds using the printable pack which I downloaded as mentioned previously.

Where’s the Birthday Cake game which has the same mechanism as Where’s the Easter Card game.   Another favorite math game!

 
Oh and this is exactly the reason why I seldom have time to post.  This is out of topic, but we really really love playing outdoors.
Animal farm family matching game.  The cards can be downloaded here.  Well this is just my version, I made this because I was inspired by My Montessori Moments who has a COMPLETE set of animal families for download.   

Lastly, we sort zoo and farm animals. 

I am looking forward of rowing this again, and hopefully by then I have enough idea, resources and time to carry out additional activities.
Linking this to:

Parts of an Apple and Tomato

We explored the parts of the apple and tomato after we did a couple of fruits activities.  Here’s the link for our apple crafts and fruit stamping.

A brief discussion of the life cycle of the apple tree. Got this file from Montessori For Everyone.

 

We worked the 3-part cards of the Parts of an Apple using the ones I bought from Montessori Print Shop. 

I took out samples of each parts of the apple and placed them on the cupcake cases.  After the “touch and feel”, I let my son match the pictures and labels to the control cards (not shown).

 

Same goes with the tomato. 

 

He was fascinated with the tomato.... he can’t stop touching the funiculus LOL.

So happy that I get to show him what’s the real thing... as comparison to what we have in the cards :)  It makes it more attractive and interesting to the little boy.  Hope I could do that to the rest of our nomenclatures.

 

Linking to:

The Colorful World of Fruits

This was inspired by this post from How We Montessori.

The printed materials were downloaded from At Home with Montessori.

 

This was one activity my son totally loved! What’s not in the picture was when we ate the other half of each fruit LOL.

Linking to:

The Life Cycle of an Apple for Preschoolers

Here’s what we did last week, how apples came to be, and where did they come from.  We did lots of work on fruits last week due to the bad weather.

Counting to 100

Using some scraps of colored cardstock, I made these..

Each set of “tens” are color coded for control of error.  We use these to practice counting from 1 to 100 and sometimes for skip counting. 

There are a lot more possible activities that can be played with it of which I have to discover yet. 

 

Happy weekend!

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