Hands-on Learning on Animal Habitats for Preschool

Last week, Vito and I revisited world biomes and animal habitats as we were talking about the fact that not all places in the world have forest whose leaves turn into yellow or orange.  This discussion led to a series of presentation of the world’s biome like desert, rainforest, taiga etc. Our printable from the shop was very handy when I presented this Vito because of the pictures, and he was very interested on the animals living on each biome.

Hands-on Learning of Geometric Shapes

Vito is currently in the mood for learning geometric shapes.  I guess he was inspired by his older brother who is currently studying basic geometry at home. Vito has passed the stage of basic shapes, the ones you see in children’s puzzles and the like.  He’s been playing with those since he was a toddler, so I decided to introduce him to geometric shapes in the Montessori classroom.  It would have been nice if we own the Geometric Cabinet, but because we can’t afford one and we don’t have space for it, these insets which are basically materials for writing is a good alternative (best to none).  Note that these are not the traditional metal insets, we are using the plastic version.

Snake Game: Search for the Perfect 10

The Snake Game is one of the most popular math games in a Montessori classroom.  I introduced this to Mavi when he was 5 years ago, contrary to Vito who is just 46 months now.  Vito’s sensitive  years for counting arrived early while for Mavi it was alphabets and reading.  How fascinating, isn’t it?

FREE Letter L Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

The leaves are beginning to fall! We’re seeing a lot in our area so yesterday, we collected a few and brought it home. Vito immediately took our letter L dot sheets to go along with his new discoveries: fallen leaves!

Preschool Learning Letter A Activities

We’ve started letter activities again because of the renewed interest of Vito with our language materials.  Let me just share with you some of these activities in case you needed ideas on how to start a letter of unit activity with your kids.

Montessori Inspired Autumn Themed Learning Activities

I finally organized our shelf and added autumn-themed activity trays to go along with the change in season.  Vito has been learning a lot from the outdoors, discovering new things (nature finds) and has been observing the changes in his surroundings.  Now to extend this learning, I prepared these activity trays.  How it works?  These are prepared and placed in the shelf (except for the paints).  At times, Vito would randomly select an activity and there are times I would place the activity tray on the table and invite him to play (or work) with me.  If he’s not interested on the said activity, I let him return it back to the shelf and make him select a new one.  This is how I check what’s miss and hit of the learning trays. 

Note that this is a MONTH LONG of activities!

FREE Letter A Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

Last spring Vito and I started to work on letters and letter sounds again (Beginning Letter Phonics Cards and Beginning Reading: Language Objects and Activities).  Because he enjoyed working on these Letter B activity sheets, he always asked for “more” sheets to work on and always repeating “buh for bird” and other b objects.  This led me to create more sheets! And because it’s apple season, I gave him “Aa” and it was perfect!  He worked on all three sheets!  More of this letter A activities but for now, I’m sharing our FREE letter A sheets.

More of Insect Activities

I discovered these rubber-made insect toys on a Euro store and bought it right away for our insect study.  My boy was so ecstatic seeing these and played sorting using a tweezer.

 

It was a perfect practical life activity for an insect study :) It include flies, ants, spiders, worms etc.

Then he also worked on the 3 part card for the parts of an insect.  We’ve been doing this activity frequently that he finally understands the difference between hind legs and forelegs.

It’s also helps to have a miniature when working on a nomenclature card.

He’s so used in working with this that he can finish it in less than 3 minutes.   

 

Linking to:

Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Last week, we looked into the life cycle of a butterfly :)

We read plenty of books before we started making our crafts.  Too bad it rained the entire week so we weren’t able to look for some caterpillars or butterflies.

Then we made the life cycle of a butterfly using cardstocks, marker pens and glitters.

              

As you can see, my son LOVES to add details :)

              

Here’s the finish product.  We used cotton balls for the eggs (and he keeps reminding me that they’re sticky so they won’t fall off the leaf).    We did the same thing for the life cycle of a ladybird.

Here, I downloaded it from Education.com (same as the grasshoppers) and made him color it.

Linking to:

Grasshoppers

We studied grasshoppers a few weeks ago and here’s a summary of the activities to go along with it:

PARTS OF A GRASSHOPPER.  Would love to have the nomenclature cards but then, I’m out of the budget :(

I put double sided tape on the boxes for Mavi to stick the labels of the body parts of the grasshopper. Then we did some grid game.  I made him circle the grasshoppers.  I wanted to reuse this print-out so I made him use a pencil instead of using a marker.

Then we discussed The life cycle of the grasshopper and did some coloring activities.

 

Linking to:

Handwriting

How do you practice handwriting?  In my case we do:

Write a story...

               

Trace numbers..

               

Lots of letter trace and copywork.

               

Observations:

1. He doesn’t write within the lines yet.  I still find it hard to explain to him WHY we needed to observe the guides (lines). This is the reason why I try to make him trace my own handwriting so he can practice using the guides.   Any techniques on this one?
2. He LOVES to write in CAPITAL letters. He keeps asking me why he should write in small letters, and I told him that books, newspapers uses small letters that’s why I’m encouraging him to do so.
3. His letter J, S and N are still written in wrong direction (looks like mirror images).  I am not sure whether this is normal for his age but I want to correct it as early as now for it would be hard to correct in the future.

Any more ideas?

Parts of a Ladybird

To conclude our ladybird unit, we studied the parts of the ladybird using nomenclature cards...

...and the felt puzzle I made.

 

Previously, we worked on some activities on the ‘life cycle of a ladybird’, read about it here.

Linking this to:

Spanish 101

We started learning Spanish last week.  Here, he’s learning numbers and colors in Spanish.  Since he knows how to read, he can easily match the labels both in English and in Spanish with the numerical number.

 

For colors, he already knows his verde, azul, amarillo and rojo.  The rest he still needs to learn them yet. So these days, we’re using Spanish whenever we talk about colors so he can get the hang of it.

I am surprise that he knows a LOT of Spanish words, thanks to Dora maybe LOL.

Life Cycle of a Ladybird

My son had been playing with his insect toys lately and since it’s summer, I decided that it was time for an insect study.  Honestly, I am terrified of insects... so it took me awhile to do something like this... because the sight of them give me the creeps.

Anyway, first on the list is the study of Ladybird. Yeah, that’s what we call them here instead of “ladybugs”.  I told my son that they’re just the same... and I made him use the word “ladybird “ for convenience. 

Here’s some of the books I borrowed from the library that is ladybird-related. 

Then I also borrowed a “bug” book and it has a few pages discussing the ladybird and it’s life cycle.  I love that it shows the detailed growth of the said bug in real pictures.

 

 

After I presented it to my boy, I printed out the Ladybug Life Cycle from Montessori Print Shop and have him color it.

I love his choice of colors! They’re all bright and vivid.

 

Oh and he wrote the labels.  I made him trace my handwriting though.

Then after that, we did some crafts for the life cycle just like what we did with the Frog.  I realized that I only took a few photos because I was busy directing and helping him out.

And here’s the end product.  Lovely isn’t it?