Fruit Unit: Inside and Out Matching Activity

We had a fabulous time last weekend examining the insides of fruits.  We did a similar activity years ago, but I didn’t want to put paints on fruits this time so I made this gorgeous matching learning material for Vito to work around with instead of recreating the insides using paints.  More details on this fruit learning material here.  This is easy to prepare and fun to work with kids!

Identifying Common Flowers for Preschoolers

Is it spring in your part of the world?  Well, it’s far from spring here but we are already starting to see spring flowers sprouting and blooming everywhere.  During our daily walks, Vito loves spotting these flowers and is identifying them.  It comes in handy that I have already prepared some learning materials to go along with this new discoveries.  Just like last year, we used these flower cards to name the spring flowers that we see in the park and in our estate.

How the Stem Works by Dyeing Flowers

I am so happy to share that we finally get to dye our flowers successfully! Meaning, ALL of the colors were visible unlike before wherein only a few of the colors took effect (red and yellow).    I’ve been wondering on how we can successfully color our flowers, with 100% coverage and we finally did it this time!  By the way, we worked on this activity because I was demonstrating to Vito the function of the stem in a plant. 

Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant

This is a follow-up activity on our Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant.

After learning about the parts of a plant, Vito and I talked about how plants grow.  We walked around the estate and identified baby plants, some of them were just actually sprouting off the ground and this amazed Vito.  We also read the book How A Seed Grows to go along with our activity, this is a really good book!  The book illustrates the different stages of a plant’s (bean plant) life, from the preparations to planting up to the the part where the grown plant needs to be moved into a ground soil.  We have a few of these Read and Find Out books and Mavi loves to use them as reference.  Anyway, aside from the book, I also used the very beautiful Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant from Safari Toob and a homemade life cycle cards (this are now available in my shop, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats).

Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant

It always excites me to introduce new things to Vito.  Our recent activity is learning about plants, specifically in this post, the parts of a plant.  I love doing plant study with the boys.  I’ve been doing this with Mavi since he was 2 years old, and I love doing it all over again with Vito!  Printed materials used in the activities were all homemade, and some were used during Mavi’s preschool days.   This is Vito’s second year of plant study, and you can read related studies here:

• Introducing plants to toddlers
• Collection of botany lessons for preschoolers
• Bean seed study
• How plants grow

Plants versus Animals Sorting Activity

I am so thankful for The Helpful Garden for providing us this printable (saved me a lot of time!).  Of all the plant and animal activities that we have done in the past, I have forgotten this one basic activity for Montessori botany and zoology: identifying plant and animals. 

Hands-On Learning on Common Flowers

Valentine's Day season is always the time wherein the boys and I would talk about flowers.  Not just because it is Valentine's Day, but because this is basically the time wherein we get to see spring flowers starting to bloom out from their buds.  We see them everywhere, in the backyard and front lawn, parks and of course in our neighbours’ houses.  My knowledge of flowers is very limited; I only knew of some tropical flowers from my country and Asian countries.  Of course, there’s always the rose, tulip and orchids… but no, I haven’t heard of daffodils, crocus and poppies not until I stepped foot in Europe.

Montessori Inspired February Activities for Preschoolers

Vito is 39 months old.

Thank goodness January is almost over!  I really don’t like January, it’s that time of the year where we get to experience the worst weather condition.  Fortunately, we have fair weather this year, it’s actually warm!  But, I am so looking forward to spring now, and I can’t wait for all these gloomy days to be over.  And speaking of spring, this month, I’ll start adding “spring” activities into our homeschool activities.  We will be using traditional Montessori materials for most part and in some, we’ll have themed activities.  Hope you like what I prepared for Vito for this month.

FREE Vegetable Hunt Activity Sheet

A simple hands-on activity for my 8 years old.  I made this scavenger hunt inspired sheet for Mavi to explore and discover vegetables in the market. I am not familiar to some of these as we have a different set of vegetables in Asia.  So this is a learning experience for both Mavi and I.  We are using this sheet to familiarize ourselves of the vegetables that grows here in the northern hemisphere and the names that they are called (we call it eggplant, but here they call it aubergine).

Montessori Inspired Vegetable Activities for Kids (Part 1)

We are all currently sick (since the weekend), we are battling cough and flu.  We spend our days resting, basically just sitting around doing random things like reading books, playing with toys or watch the kids’ favourite TV shows.  Because I was able to do some groceries last weekend, I decided to whip a vegetable activities for the boys yesterday using the ones I bought from the store.  My aim for these activities is to introduce healthy foods to the kids for fast recovery (from our sickness) and healthy diet.   The cards are from my shop and both of my kids love it!

Montessori Botany Learning Materials

Last month, both of my sons fell ill and were bedridden for almost a week. During that time, I had plenty of free time during the day, but was busy taking care of Vito at night. To make the most of my available free time, I decided to enhance the Montessori botany cards and booklets that Vito will be utilizing this spring. I personally handcrafted some of these materials, and I'm proud of the results. If you're interested, feel free to come take a look!

Learning About Fruits and Vegetables for Preschoolers

Vito is 36 months old.

These fruits and vegetables cards were taken out of the storage box and has been used ever since.  It’s been used for naming and identifying fruits and vegetables and also served as matching cards.

Our Leaf Shapes Study

It’s Mavi’s midterm break this week, and I decided to have activities that both boys can do together.  First in mind is a leaf study since we are surrounded by beautiful and colorful leaves.  They are just too gorgeous when they change colors, and I don’t want to miss that opportunity!  We also used our Montessori Inspired Leaf Shapes printable for this activity, which you can buy from my shop.

Life Cycle of a Pumpkin (Preschool Edition)

We are seeing a lot of pumpkins and though we may not be able to visit a pumpkin patch, we brought home a couple of pumpkins for exploration. I would like to share this very beautiful layered puzzle that I purchased in Amazon.  It’s the Life Cycle of a Pumpkin, beautifully crafted and illustrated.  There’s a guide for each layer on the left side so the child will know what comes next.

Easy to Prepare Apple Activities for Preschoolers

Vito is 34 months old.
Apple is Vito’s favourite fruit.  He had an amazing time exploring his favourite fruit last week, as we explored how the apples came to me, its parts and an instant apple counting (because he loves to count too!).

Life Cycle of an Apple Preschool Unit

Vito is 34 months old.

I am so excited to share this with you! Last week, I set up an apple life cycle to Vito (and Mavi on the background) for a little science exploration.  Apple is his favourite fruit and he was so delighted to see these materials in our shelf!  Now if you take a look at our activity and materials, they’re pretty simple and easy to follow by a young preschooler. I assembled it in such a way that it’s not too overwhelming for him, yet enjoying and engaging. 

Flower Matching Cards

This Valentines Day, we are having flower activities!

How to Teach a Toddler About Trees

During the midterm break I’ve been taking the boys out because of the glorious weather.    And since whenever we’re out, Mavi would climb the trees (and Vito would do the same), I took the chance to formally introduce Vito to trees.  Since he’s able to say words straight and could grasp simple concept, it’s about time I show him the wonders of trees!

The BEST way to learn about trees is to have a personal encounter with it.  And since we’re surround by them, we explored trees’ by climbing, touching and feeling their barks, observing the leaves colors, compare sizes and more. 

For Vito though, trees are something that he can climb on.  Whenever he sees a tree, he would just insist to climb onto it, like the picture below.  He was just in that position for about 30 minutes, not complaining and enjoying every single moment of it.

 

With these, I can conclude that Vito can somehow understand now that trees :

• have leaves
• have rough barks
• comes in big and small sizes
• are something we can play with

Now, for extensions,  I also prepared simple tree-themed activities for Vito at home for indoor play and learning.  Here are the trays I prepared for him:

Counting Trees.  Vito loves this! I stamped four dots in the paper with a number symbol and we count as we place a tree on each dot.  I used a do-a-dot marker for this.

Matching Trees (Abstract-Abstract).  Remember when we worked on leaves and he’s not interested in matching cards at all?  Well, that changed now as he was able to work on our matching tree cards without hesitation!  And yes he completed the four pairs with much concentration. I love it!  You can get these beautiful cards from here or click the image below.

Tree Puzzle.  He loves working on tree puzzle but somehow, our tree puzzle is still too complicated for his age.  He knows where to place the roots and trunk as of the moment, but finds it hard to fit them in the puzzle board.  So what I do is just ask him where the piece is supposed to go, he points and I do the fitting.

Tree Matching.  Similar matching activity as above, but in this case we are using a tree figure and matching it to cards.  We are doing lots of matching activities as this introduces early math concepts and object discrimination.  Tree figures are from Safari Toobs.

Books.  These are the books that we focused on during the week of our tree themed activities: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and The Acorn’s Story, both of which are so enjoyable to read!

And how long do we have this for a theme? Mostly for 7-10 days!  Of course, these are just some of the thing he does, he also plays with his toy and read book, learn letters and numbers.  It’s just that I love introducing new concept/s each week and in a way its easier for me to focus on just one or two things.

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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.

The Plant Kingdom

Presenting to you Plant Kingdom printable material.  We used this recently in our Plant Kingdom nature study.  This is perfect for grade-schoolers who want to learn and understand all about the world of plants and how they are classified.