Introducing the Montessori Pink Series for Beginning Reading

I've talked about Vito’s sensitive years for letters in my Instagram account.  Since September, he’s been into letter sounds, identifying beginning letter sounds, sorting objects according to sound, making rhymes, forming words, pretending to read and deciphering words etc. so I decided to give him a “structured” activity on alphabets.  Here’s what we have been doing so far:

1. Five in a Row activities that are tied to a letter
2. A letter of the week kind of activity to go along with a holiday or season (letter l and letter a)
3. Reading lots of books
4. After learning a letter, we would read and create his own phonics booklet

During the course of these activities, I observed that he would try to decipher a word, or pretend to create words using sticky tapes, in writing and using our moveable alphabet.  Plus, he knows 90% of the letter sounds (though he's still confused with c and k).  With the signs, I knew he would be ready for the Montessori Pink Series.  And oh boy, it was the best decision I made!

The Alphabet Sound Books for Learning Letters

I am so excited to share our Alphabet Sound Books!  Vito is currently in a sensitive period for letters and I knew I just have to provide him with these booklets which I also made for Mavi years ago when he was learning his letters.

FREE Letter P Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

We are carving a pumpkin this week so we also worked on our letter P activities!

Learning The Human Skeleton for Preschoolers

We’ve been singing a lot of Halloween songs at home lately and Vito was fascinated with the Skeleton Dance song.  I decided to give him some activities on skeletons just like what Mavi and I did years ago (The Skeletal System).

The Montessori Constructive Triangles

I am so excited to introduce to you the Montessori Constructive Triangles!  This is one of my favourite Montessori material because I find it useful  for my 3 years old and my elementary.  In this post, I’m showing you each of the content of the boxes and how it is being used in learning plane geometric shapes.

FREE Letter S Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

Halloween is just around the corner and we are having skeleton activities these coming weeks!  To go along with this, I am sharing this dot sheets for you to work with your child in learning beginning letters and tracing.  Hope you like this and enjoy!

Internal Organs: Puzzle and Nomenclature Cards

This is my last post of my Human Body series.

After we go about the internal organs, I made my son do this puzzle which I bought when we were in Singapore.  It’s actually an eraser LOL and I got it for less than a dollar :) He loves puzzles!

              

 

And then we worked on the nomenclature cards which I got from Montessori Print Shop.

Hope you enjoy our Human Body unit study!  Hope to be more creative the next time we visit this unit ;)

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Internal Organs of the Human Body

This is the second part of our unit study of the Human Body.  After we have formed our Skeletal System, I introduced to Mavi the internal organs of the human body.  We started with the brain of course...

BRAIN.  I printed a black and white image of the brain and colored it to save ink.  I talked about how important the our brain is, how it controls every senses we have and affects how we think or respond to certain event.  And I added that it is very delicate that’s why we should avoid banging our head so as not to damage the brain.

              

LUNGS.  Our lungs looked funny because they were too small LOL.  Important thing for him to remember her is that we use our lungs to breath. 

              

Then I showed him how lungs work using a plastic.  He can’t resist though and wanted to try it too.

HEART.  Heart pumps the blood in our body and that it produces a beating sound.  This part he loves the most... listening to my heartbeat! I just hope he still recognizes that sound... he’s listening to it for months while he’s in womb :)

LIVER, STOMACH, INTESTINES.  This part seems a little complicated to him.  I just described this system on a level of a 4yr old :)

BLADDER.  The organ that holds the urine (waste water) is the bladder.  He’s interested with it because he’s always curious how and why he urinates.

These are the basic organs that I think are essential for my son to learn as he keeps on asking about his body.  I think it’s not that much though... I just picked the ones I know his brain can digest easily.  We’ll definitely revisit this subject next year! 

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The Skeletal System

My son has been fascinated with the human skeletal system.  He’s been singing Dem Bones for months now and enjoys the skeleton dance.  With this, I decided to throw a human body system unit so he can have an overview of what he is made of.

There’s the books which I got from the library.  I am so thankful for our wonderful library, they have an amazing collection of fiction and non fiction books for kids!

A Visit to the Zoo

A few weeks ago, we visited the city zoo.  Mavi has been asking about it for a long time now and since husband was on leave we just have to grab the opportunity see the animals while it’s still summer.

We have been to 4 zoos in the past three years, and they’re all in different places.  Will tell you about it soon.  And by far, he enjoyed this one the most.   I love the zoo, and it’s not just my son who enjoys seeing the animals but its me and my husband too.  Just like this one, it’s our first encounter with a white rhinos and gorillas.  We were so enthralled!  They were even more beautiful in person rather than in books!

                  

The zoo has mini-conservatories as well.  They have this house that preserves the furs of lions and tigers.  My son had a great time ‘feeling’ their furs.  

         

And they have displays of some animal skulls.  Here they have the skulls of zebra, giraffe, chimpanzee, crocodile etc.

And of course, what made my son even more happier is encountering a human skeleton!! He loves it to bits!

 

Then before we headed home, we passed by the “Farm” area... and here kids are allowed to feed the farm animals.  Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the cow milking session.  My son would have like participating on it :)  Oh well, maybe next time.

 

I don’t usually share or talk about our trips because I wanted to keep it private.  But some readers have asked me if there are some things that we also do aside from homeschool activities. 

Of course we do have a lot of fun things whenever the weather permits!! Whenever it’s safe to go outside (am talking about the weather), we definitely go out and play some ball, or go to playgrounds, or somewhere else other than the 4 corners of our house LOL.  We travel as well too. 

Anyway, will share about it soon.

Happy Thursday everyone!

3D Shapes

We had a short vacation last week thus the absence of homeschool activities. We had so much fun exploring the beautiful sites of the north, visited the zoo and a lot more.  Will share it here soon!

Anyway, Mavi and I made some models for our 3D shapes lesson.  But it seems that the little guy was more interested in making cards for his friends and applying glitter glues on it.

              

                

We waited for it to dry up. And here they are...

Too bad I couldn’t make a sphere!  As you can see, my son wrote letters on it LOL.  We sorted out the printables that I got from Montessori Printshop.

Using these models, I’m happy that he can now distinguish 3d shapes with the plain ones.  And it is surprising that he memorizes the name of all the models that we created!

 

Source:  Patterns for the 3D models are all from Paper Models of Polyhedra

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Planets and the Solar System

Saw this book from the library and I thought my son would like it.

 

And he did!  The book got lots of interesting images of the planets and is loaded of information which are very easy for an almost 4 yr old to understand.  I also love that each planet were discussed and has trivia on each one.

                        

Later we made planets using paints.   As we paint each planet, we first refer to the book, discuss the color and try mixing the paints so we can come up with the exact color as presented in the book. And this is how they look like as we wait for them to dry up.

Once they’re cooked, I cut them up so we can glue them on a black cardstock.  They look absolutely perfect!

My son started cutting the orange paper for his Sun.

Then we glue them on the cardstock.  We talk about the order  of the planets in the solar system as we glue them.  Here it seen that he is adding glitters on our space. 

 

Then we waited again for them to dry so we can start playing with it using our Safari Space Toob.

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