Preschool Learning Letter L Activities

Presenting our letter “l” activities!  We’ve started “letter of the week” kind of activities since September because of Vito’s interest in letter sounds and reading.  We’ve been reading FIAR books over the summer and this led him to further explore words and language activities.  

Favourite Activity Trays for Autumn

Have you seen our activities this autumn season?  I would usually round it up into tray activities for archiving and easier reference.  Below are the details of each activity trays that we’ve been enjoying for the past months.

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!

Fall Counting Activities Using Nature’s Objects (FREE Printable)

It’s our favourite time of the year and we are spending more time outdoors observing the change in season and gathering objects from mother nature!   In my Instagram, I’ve been posting pictures of the boys gathering chestnuts, conkers, pine cones and acorn outdoors and bringing them home.  If you’ve been following my blog, we call them “nature finds” and at home, the boys would play with them, mostly exploring the objects (texture, smell and color) and of course, counting how many items they collected.

The Owl and Other Nocturnal Creatures

With all these Halloween decorations, Vito became fascinated with owls. We’ve been reading The Owl and Owl Babies for days now, and he loves looking at the pictures matching his animal figure. He would also pretend to to have big eyes and pretend flying around the house and say “Im owl Mommy”.    So I whipped a few activities to help him explore this beautiful creature together with some night-time animals.

Autumn Nature Finds and How We Use Them

We’ve been blessed with a beautiful weather last week. It’s actually pretty warm and sunny for September in Ireland which is quite unusual.  So I grabbed the opportunity to walk the boys everyday and collect nature objects.  We placed them in a basket and displayed it on the shelf for exploration and learning.

Cork Stamping Art: Trees in Autumn

Vito is 34 months old.

My youngest is not really the artistic type. But even though he’s not into painting crafty things, I make sure that these art materials are always available just in case they feel like doing some artistic pursuits. So imagine my delight when he decided to join me with this autumn trees painting activity.

What is Montessori “Cards and Counters”?

Vito is 34 months.

“Cards and Counters” is a Montessori math activity that introduces the child to the units of quantity.  This is to reinforce the sequence in numbers (one to ten) and to give the child a visual experience of quantity.

Vito loves to count.  He counts pictures, objects and anything that interests him. So for his preschool math, I decided to give him a jumpstart on cards and counters. Take a look at the different ways we explore counting using Autumn-themed objects.

Preschool Letter R

We started our preschool unit with letter R and I divided the activities into two:  (1) phonological awareness and (2) pre-writing.  The pre-reading activities is scheduled on Mondays and pre-writing on Tuesdays.  Vito does no more than 20 minutes of “school” per day.  The rest of the activities, Vito considers it as “game” or “play”.  During “school” time, I would quit the activities once I see that he’s bored or not interested.  My experience has taught me that it’s not about the quantity of activities that I give to my kids that matter.  In fact, they get tired so easily and bored when I do that.  Especially with Vito, I learned that I should do things slowly with him, and that I should respect and follow his own timeline of learning.  Mavi was different, he absorbs anything… he’s always interested, Vito is very choosy.

Going back, this week we’re starting with the letter R. Vito can name the letters of the alphabet if he’s in the mood so I decided that I should be giving him pre-reading activities so he won’t get bored.  Below are some of the activities this week for pre-reading and pre-writing.

 

Autumn Themed Preschool Math Activities

Vito is starting “preschool” math this school year and we are not using any curriculum.  I guess it’s not necessary in our case.  I will be using my experience with Mavi and with the thousand ideas online on setting up “play-based” and Montessori-inspired activities for Vito this school year.  So in order for me to be able to organize and prepare materials ahead of time, I decided to come up with seasonal-themes for the upcoming months.

Letter L: Leaf Activities in Autumn

We are joining the bandwagon of autumn-themed activities and for Vito, we’re having leaf activities!

Leaf Color Matching

Got these beautiful craft leaves from a local store and used them for sorting colors.  I just dumped them in a container and would take one leaf at a time. I then mention the color and placed it to where it belongs.  Vito loves calling out their names!  I am not sure if he could recognize colors yet, it’s a hit or miss for him.  It’s a challenge to put up a color sorting activity for him so I put an extra effort on making it fun like making noises or funny sounds as I drop the leaf to the sorted group.