Learning About Farm Families

I shared in my Instagram last week that Vito is obsessed with the concept of “mommy, baby, and daddy” thing.  He would always pair our animal figures into families and do play pretend.  This made me decided to introduce Vito to the farm animal families which I introduced to Mavi a long time ago (Farm Families - FREE Sorting Cards).  There’s a deeper explanation why we teach kids about animal families.  We teach kids to distinguish and describe objects to form them into bigger groups.   Commonly, we group inanimate objects according to their size, shape and color which is an easy task for the child.  But when it comes to real organisms with no definite shape, size and color, it is more difficult to recognize similar characteristics. 

.

FREE Land Water and Air Sorting Mats

Many of my blog followers are requesting for these sorting mats and I’m so happy to finally get to share them with you!!  You can now download a copy of our land, water and air sorting mats which Vito and I would use in sorting different animal figures (Safari Toobs and Schleich) whether they thrive in land, water or in the sky.  See how we used the sorting mats in this post, Introducing Toddlers to Animals in Land, Water and Air.

Animal Habitats Sorting and Activity Sheets

Vito is 40 months old.

If you read my post on the 12 Months More of Montessori for Earth Science, Vito and I will be working on animal habitats.  We tried this before, in its simplest form when Vito was still a toddler and I decided to move forward into a more abstract approach (with some sensorial activity) now that Vito is older.  In this post, I’m going to share the learning materials which the boys are using and the books to go along with our activities.

Animals Around the World Activity

Vito is 39 months old.

There is nothing more precious in this world than seeing your kids work together peacefully LOL.  During the midterm break, I prepared some activities which both of them can participate in.  It’s not just about the academics, but my main purpose is for them to learn how to work together as a team and bond as brothers.  So aside from learning about flowers, the boys also explored the animals of the world using our Montessori Inspired Animal Continents Activity Sheets.  Mavi was so ecstatic to do this with Vito as he loves animals (he said he’s an expert) and geography.

Montessori Inspired ASIA Continent for Preschoolers

Vito is 39 months old.

This month, I’m helping Vito explore the Asia continent .  We’ve started continent study last year, which was followed by an exploration of the penguins in Antarctica.  We occasionally look at Maps and work on the continent puzzle, and based on my observation, Vito is ready to learn about Asia.

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.

Animals and their Covers

My boys love animal covers!  We used this whenever we want to play around with or beautiful animals from Schleich or whenever Mavi wants to replicate them through drawing.

Dinosaur Small World Play Tray

Here’s what a mother can  do to her dinosaur-obsessed kids. 

The Animal Kingdom Revisited

No school for Mavi means brainstorming for future activities. He opened up lately that he wanted to study about animals again, so I took out our cards on The Animal Kingdom and checked what else we missed and haven’t explored yet.  He reviewed the cards and sorted out the things that he wanted to learn this year.  He picked arthropods, starfish and jellyfish! Yay, something new!

Our Favourite Toys for 2 to 7 Years Old

**Contains affiliate links**

“As parents and grandparents, we think that we are showing children we love them by giving them things.  In fact such practice, in and out of itself, may send them the wrong message.  Children may conclude that if people give you things, they love you.  If receiving things tells you that you are loved, the next logical step is to measure self-worth by what you have, not by what you are.  The reality is that very young children can only truly love one doll, one stuffed animal, and a few toys at a time. This experience provides a basis for adult life where one must learn to cherish one spouse, one family, one life, instead of fantasizing that it is possible to ‘have it all’.”  - MONTESSORI FROM THE START

We don’t have a lot of toys at home.  Mavi just like two kinds of toys: LEGO and dinosaur/animal figures, that’s just it.  All through the years, I don’t splurge nor buy toys as we don’t have the budget for it. I consider them as luxury so I just gave toys to Mavi as presents on his birthday and Christmas.  But because we “home” school, I purchase learning materials that my kids see as “toys” but in reality they are NOT really toys.    And because I am frugal, I buy toys that they can grow with, MULTIPURPOSE and something that they can play together.   So let me share with you the kids’ favourite things in the house.  These are the toys that we have in the house, except for the ones in my “wishlist and basket”.  These toys are being played day in and day out by the boys.

NOTE:  ALWAYS SUPERVISE YOUNGER CHILDREN WHEN USING ANY OF THESE TOYS.  Do not leave them unattended.

FAVOURITE TOYS

LEGO, DUPLO and PLAYMOBIL.  Need I say more? These are the favourite in the house. We have plenty of LEGOs as this is Santa’s favourite present EVERY Christmas for 4 years!  And Vito’s Duplo and Playmobil were brought from the local store when they were on 50% off. I would never get them for a whole price! Vito is now snapping bricks together and loves the Playmobil people.  Both of my boys spend hours and hours playing with these toys.  They never get tired of them.  Perfect toy for creativity, concentration and developing fine motor skills!

For Playmobils, we have castles and pirates. They’re Mavi’s favourite toy and can play with them for hours!

My son loves the LEGO CLASSIC Bricks.  He doesn’t really like those with premade designs as he always wanted to design his own thing. So I highly recommend that you buy the basic LEGO BRICKS especially if you are getting your first Lego.  Having a plate is also good. 

 

 

miniLUK and BambiniLUK.  Mavi and I looooves this! We can’t get enough of answering all the booklets, especially those tricky ones!  I bought the Starter Pack and bought the advanced booklets separately.  There’s a version for younger kids, the BambiniLUK and some friend in Instagram said that they like it. Mavi is like “Mom, its making my brain tired LOL”

 

Montessori Botany  and Zoology/Insect Puzzles, Montessori Puzzle Maps.  I invested on these this year and it was worth it! I have puzzle loving kids, and Vito is currently addicted to them.  Aside from educational, these puzzles are also perfect for pincer grasp practice.  Mavi on the other hand is obsessed with my Asia and Europe puzzles.  He loves geography, loves to learn about countries and their locations.  Tower High Learning is my favourite Montessori shop as of the moment and this is where I purchase my materials.

 

Schliech Animal Figures and Safari Toobs are also an all time favourite in the house. The uses of these figures include imaginative play, learning about animals, habitat play, exploring landmarks and just about anything!  You see these mostly in my post!  When Vito was younger, I made him use Schleich animal figures because they are bigger but now that he has overcome his mouthing, he uses both Schleich and Safari Toob. Mavi is obsessed with dinosaurs, and he uses them now as characters for his homemade videos LOL.   Now he uses both types for play and learning.

 

 

Hape Uppercase, Lowercase and Number Puzzles.  With Mavi, I used the Melissa and Doug Magnetic letters (I still have them) and they were really really loved.  Now the problem is Vito mouths things and I made Vito use it, the sticker of the letters were removed.  So I looked for an alternative alphabet toys for us to use and I discovered these amazing puzzles from Hape. They are WORTH-IT! We love using them in anything, from learning letters, puzzles to stacking! Yes, Vito loves to stack these together! We also use it to sort out colors!  Multi-purpose indeed!  But if you have older kids, Melissa and Doug Magnetic Letters are as good as well. 

   

Because I love to cook (Asian and Italian), the boys also love to pretend cooking with me using these Melissa and Doug cooking toys.  They can play for hours with these!

M-cro Maxi Scooter.  And I just have to include this!! Because they play with this scooter in and out of the house! Mavi uses this to school and Vito uses this indoor for scooting practice. I love that it is sturdy and kids can easily balance!

And of course, nothing beats classic toys like balls, cars and PlayDoh!  My boys wouldn’t complain if they receive any of these this Christmas.

WISHLIST

Magnatiles. Rave reviews everywhere but I just couldn’t bring myself to purchase these tiles or can’t even justify it   Maybe when they’re 50% off I would probably get one for the boys!

Unit Block.  I know that the boys will love this as well.  They can build and create so many things with this but the price is just too much for me.  I still have to think about this a million times.

Beleduc Puzzles.  My puzzle loving kids will love these puzzle series, especially the Your Body Layer puzzles!

Europe Continent Study for Grade Schoolers

We are revisiting our Europe study, this time I’ve decided to take it by regions.  But before we dive into that, we reviewed some of the things we’ve learned in the past years.

Europe Continent Study: European Regions

Here’s a new study for this year, learning Europe through its regions.  Here I was showing Mavi the divisions and the boundaries in the map.  I bought this map years ago at Montessori Print Shop.  So we’re doing a color code here based on our map in Europe in a Nutshell.  Blue for northern Europe, red for western Europe, green for eastern Europe and orange for southern Europe.

Letter Z: Zoo Animal Activities

** contains affiliate links **

Vito is 22 months old.

Vito is currently obsessing over his Schleich zoo animals.  I just started collecting these animal figures early this year as I can see that both of my boys can benefit from it.  I decided to put together zoo-themed activities for the little Vito, an opportunity to learn and explore the letter ‘z’.

Dear Zoo Story Basket

Vito loves this Dear Zoo book!  We read it over and over again each day, and he specifically loves opening and closing the flaps to discover the animal hidden in it.

Zoo Animal Tracks

My boys can’t get enough of playdough, and we used our Schleich animals to create beautiful tracks!  It was a total hit!

Animal Skin Covers

And who wouldn’t love skin patterns! It amazes me how Vito can match the animals with its cover!  I only prepared 6 of his favourite animals and he is working on them everyday.  As we progress, I’ll add up some more to make it challenging for him.

Letter Z Craft

Our letter of the week (craft) is usually hanged in the wall for a week’s view (for recognition) LOL.

Animals Clean Up

Original plan was to wash and brush these animals.  But it was cold and we couldn’t do it indoors so I ended up giving him the wipes instead.  He enjoyed this!

Zoo Animals Matching Cards

Something that he do everyday as well, matching the figures with the cards! This activity is for object recognition, discrimination and exactness. You can download your FREE copy from here.

The images in the cards are from Schleich.

Letter Z Object Basket

Our object basket is typically for letter recognition and phonics sounds.

And that’s all about our fun adventure of learning the letter z sound and zoo animals.  Stay tuned for our next letter sound of the week… something to do with autumn!  And yes, please don’t forget to pin this for later!

Other letter sound we’ve done:

Letter a for apple

Letter b for ball

Letter c for car

Letter d for dinosaur

Letter e for egg

Letter s for star

FREE Zoo Animals Matching Cards for Toddlers

Vito is 22 months

Vito is in to matching these days! Whenever he sees an object that has a match on books, he would immediately get it and put it together.  We started matching activities earlier with our Farm Animal Activities, and since we moved to zoo animals, I also created a set of matching cards for our Schleich toy figures (all Schleich images).  So far we’re only using the tiger, jaguar, alligator, hippopotamus, elephant and lion figures.

FREE Farm Animals Matching cards

We are having a Farm Unit this week and Vito is loving these farm animals matching cards.  This is the first time that we’re using these matching cards.

Teaching Animals to Toddlers

What is it with animals that kids love? My husband asked me this question when he saw my pile of Safari Toob animal figures years ago and asked me why I incorporate animals in our homeschool activities. I have no scientific answer to his question but all I know was that Mavi was enchanted with animals (until now!). The way I see it, it's because of the unique sounds they make and how different they look from their parents and siblings LOL. 

As a young boy, Mavi loved singing the Old McDonald song because he enjoys making the animal sounds. He can get hooked for hours to any animal-related activities and play. Of course, a visit to the zoo completes all these lessons and activities. We've been to four zoos for the 6 years, all of which are in different countries. As of this writing, Mavi is obsessed with dinosaurs even if he haven't seen one. 

Now comes Vito. He also loves animals. The first animal sound that he ever made was that of the dinosaur's (thanks to his big brother!). Aside from dog, cow, bird and cat, Vito identifies other animals through their sound. Now with this sudden interest, I am joining the bandwagon of "invitation to play". If you haven't heard about it yet, here's an amazing tutorial from Teach Preschool.

So this is my first attempt of setting up an invitation to play of animals for Vito.  Oh boy! He was so happy, kept on jumping and clapping his hand showing his excitement!   As we play, I keep telling him the names of the animals and their sounds.  This is what he likes best. See the picture on the left? He's asking "what's this?" and that's a cue for me to answer and make the sounds LOL.

 But guess who enjoyed it the most??? The big brother! 

I wish I could get rid of all the furnitures in the sitting room and replace it with a huge play table for these boys lol.

He specifically loves this popsicle stick cage Mavi created for him.  Vito still mouths objects so I'm not letting him use our Safari Toob animal figures.  What we are using here are Schleich animals and Duplos.  The stacking cups you see there are Playskool Barrels which are my son's favourite toy.

Now this was an awesome and unplanned activity, and it turned out enjoyable for the boys!  Why not start doing your invitation to play?

You don't need to buy new toys. Just make use of what you already have, set it up in  table accessible for the kids, add some craft sticks.. papers, baskets and playdough and you're all set!

Now be sure to pin this for later!

you

We do a lot of fun and educational activities at home. To keep up with the updates, visit in the blog The Pinay Homeschooler, or in Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.