FREE Pinecone Letter and Number Cards

My freebie of the month is no other than the pinecone letters and number cards!  Our pumpkin and apple has been very popular lately so I wanted to share these pinecone cards for free!

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.

Hands-on Learning on Herbs and Spices

I needed to discard some herbs, but before doing so I decided to whip a sensorial activity with the boys to make use of these scented plants.  I already have Herbs and Spices learning materials from years ago, so the preparation was quite easy.  I also added more spices like turmeric, cumin, black peppercorn, garlic, ginger, and cloves.

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 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

Beginning a Plant Study with a Toddler

The perfect way to introduce plants to a child/toddler is through awakening their interest and love of flowers.  Kids love flowers naturally.  We love to look at them, and occassionaly name the flowers as we see them in the road.


Now that Vito appreciates trees and flowers, the next step is to inspire him with a desire to care for and preserve plants and flowers.  Here’s Vito’s early learning of plants!

Flowers in Spring (Part Two)

It’s so difficult to write a post these days. (been busy with personal work).  Good thing I keep pictures so it’s for me to track back the activities we did on a specific day/week. 

Here’s the conclusion of our Flower Unit which we started a few weeks ago. 

We picked flowers and identify them.  We later on used them as paint brushes.  Read about it here.

Another thing we did was make flowers out of cupcake cases.  We used do-a-dot markers to color each cases then let them dry.

While for our flowers to dry up, Mavi painted the egg carton so we can use them as plant box.

We use pipe cleaners as stems and inserted some beads on it to add a more decors to our flowers.

 

The end product.  I realize that the cases were too big for our plant box, thus... it is no longer visible LOL.  He placed this in his bedroom window and admired it for a few days.

He worked on flower nomenclature cards and puzzle as well.

 

Practical Life

Using clamp and chopstick trainer to transfer rose petals.  

 

Outdoor

Now this is exactly the reason why I always procrastinate to write any updates... we spend my free time outdoors!    It was just so timely that during the time we did our flower unit, we were blessed with a wonderful weather!

  

  

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Flowers in Spring (Part One)

Flowers are blooming everywhere! My loves smelling daffodils, picking up dandelions and admiring cherry blossoms.  With his current interest, I pulled out a flower theme so I can make use of these interests.

Here’s a craft which was inspired by No Time For Flashcards.  The number corresponds to the number of petals in the flower.  Then he insisted on adding stems and leaves and grasses.

 

Then on sunny day, we explore the estate to pick up some flowers and identify some wildflowers as well.

 

Once at home, we identified each flowers and matched them to the ones in the books. (Books were borrowed from our library)

We also used some of the flowers as paint brushes for his artwork.

He managed to use the leaves as well :)

We such had a great time working with flowers!  Reminds me of myself wayyy back a long time ago... enjoying picking up flowers during summer with my friends as well. 

Happy Monday everyone!

 

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Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.16 – 01.20)

Last week’s activities includes:

A unit study on Plants and Flowers

Read about our entire unit here (part 1) and here for part 2.

Practice writing and coloring using worksheets.

I was surprise how much he has improved with coloring even if we haven’t done it for quite a while now. 

Though my son is obsessive with alphabets... tracing letters is not his liking :(

And we also work on some math workbooks (this was given to me by a friend back home).

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More Plants and Flower Activities

Supplemental activities for our Plants and Flower theme:

We discussed how buds became flowers.

  

Flower puzzle and while completing it, we discussed the different parts by placing the labels on the correct parts.

This is how it looked like when he completed it.  My bad, I didn’t have any guide/control cards so I I guided him a little where to put the exact location of the stamens.  Though there’s an outline provided on the paper as his guide. 

     

Other activities include reading books and looking at different types of flowers.  Then we replicate those flowers using our art papers.  He was fascinated with the different shapes and colors of the flower.   

Practicing pincer grasp by pin pricking the flower shape.  This is his first time to do such an activity and wasn’t into it.  And he doesn’t want to prick on the outline... he’s more interested pricking on the spaces :)

With our “plant” theme... we walked around the estate and discussed the different type of plants that he sees.  And we took a sample of each part (except for the roots)... from flowers to stem. We brought it at home and identified each one juxtaposed the Plants Nomenclature card which I purchased from MPS.

See him in action doing the plant’s 3-part cards, paper crafts, coloring the parts of a plant and discussing the life cycle of a plant via a book which was given to him by hi godparents.

Well... ‘twas an activity my son truly enjoyed.  Hopefully, we can revisit this theme by Spring or Summer :)

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Homeschool Wrap-Up (01.6 - 01.13)

An overdue post due to lots of work. 

Color mixing

              

With the use of medicine dropper and food coloring.  He attempted to paint a car (left picture) using the his mixes.

 

Pink Series

We’ve been doing this almost every day.  Currently we’re doing the ‘objects and moveable letters’ and ‘objects and cards’.  Next week we’ll be doing the abstract version, that’s using picture cards instead of objects.  After which we also work on the worksheets for the Pink Series: beginning and ending sounds.

Since I don’t have a printer, I just wrote these beginning and ending letters on a cardstock, covered it with a contact paper (I don’t own a laminator) and made him use a dry erase pen.  This way, we can always reuse our worksheets.

In case you want to know, here are objects for the Pink Series.

 

Math

We learned about time and how to read it.  See my post here.

Then also had Addition for our Math. The concept here is similar to that of Montessori’s Addition Strip Board but instead we used blue and red bear counters.  I plant to make another set using printed materials whenever my son progresses fromthis.

        

Painting

We do this almost everyday.  He also request for his paints until we ran out of it :(

Botany:  PLANTS AND FLOWERS

This week, we jumpstart our Plants and Flowers activities.  Read about it here.

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