Holiday Homecoming Part I

As you all know, family and I went home last month to celebrate Christmas and New Year with the family in our homeland.  I've always wanted Mavi to experience how it's like to celebrate the holidays at home, to be with grandparents, cousins and relatives and to enjoy the local sights and festivities.

So allow me to share some pictures from our trip. First stop, the in-laws!

Zoocobia
We always visit the zoo whenever we go places. And we’re so lucky that there’s a new zoo located near my in-laws place.  Because we were considered as “VIP”, we get to have our own tour guide and had a close encounter with most of the animals in the zoo. 

Here we get to….

Hold a parrot

   

Get lost in the Garden Maze

          

Go Carting

Feed the ostrich

 

Feed the monkey

 

Feed a camel, goat, and donkey

And see in person the animal that produces one of the most expensive coffees in the world, the wild civet. 

Sky Ranch
We love that there was a night carnival in town!  First time for Mavi to be out at night (not in the cold), and enjoying the carnival ride!

Dinosaur Island
Saving the best for last, we visited the newly established Dinosaur Island, just a few minutes from the in-law’s place.  Mavi's obsessed with dinosaurs and he was ecstatic upon arrival!

The Dinosaur Island is right in the middle of a rainforest, and that dinosaur statues were so impressive! It's like an outdoor museum of dinosaurs, and even if their animation and sound effects were limited, Mavi and the entire had a wonderful time viewing the elect... dinosaurs.

Aside from these sights, we get to visit relatives as well. After celebrating Christmas at my in-laws house, we travelled again for a day via a domestic flight going to my folk’s house to spend the New Year. Pictures coming up for Part II!

Montessori Practical Life: Folding Clothes

We're back from our 3 weeks vacation and it was amazing! Now I'll save details on a separate post, for now allow me to show you how Mavi has been very helpful for the past few days.  I give credit to the years of training of practical life activities based on Maria Montessori philosophy.

The traditional work in the family is known as the practical life work and is the most important area of an education for  life. These practical life activities provides children the  groundwork for physical, mental and social development.   And what’s more important is that it’ll teach them the work habits that will lead to success in academic and in all aspects of life later.

One of the chores I dread doing is folding the laundry.  My husband usually do this for me, but since he's busy most of the time, the folding doesn't get done and the laundry would pile up at times.  Now this is where Mavi comes in handy.  I gave him the responsibility of folding his own clothes, sort and put them directly in his closet.

To start with,  Mavi would sort his own clothes from the pile of laundry.

I placed masking tape on his shirt, pants and underpants and these serves as a guide for folding.  There's a number on the tape to indicate which one he will fold first. 

He enjoys folding as he finds the approach “scientific” due to the order of how you fold a piece.

For now, I’m giving him the task to fold his own clothes. Once he masters this, then he can fold his little brother’s clothes.

 

At the end, he's happy that he was able to help, felt accomplished and proud that he was able to contribute something for Mommy.

More practical life activities can viewed in my Pinterest Board:

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Practical Life on Pinterest.

 

Don’t forget to follow me!

 

This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

Amazing blogs involved in the 12 Months of Montessori Learning

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now ~ The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama's Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Every Star Is Different ~ Child Led Life ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler

12 Practical Life Christmas Activities: On the 5th day…

Painting a Monet-inspired Christmas tree.

Remember how I raved about the books of James Mayhew (the Katie series)? We'll one of our favourite books is the Katie Meets the Impressionist [aff. link]. We talked about the style of Monet and why he is called an “impressionist” artist.

 

And since its Christmas, we use the Christmas tree as an inspiration.

Below, we work together all the time. His and hers.

We dabbed and smeared our drawing paper with green for the tree. He used a pencil to draw a triangle outline as guide which is not visible in the picture.  Then we added details for the balls, lights, stars and presents under the tree.

 

Here’s my tree.

 

Mavi’s tree.

Now here’s a macro look of our tree…

                        

Toddler Beginnings 02

We’re reading Christmas stories with these books (Mavi and Vito).  I didn’t have time to visit the local library so these books from last year’s purchases were of great help!

For this week, we did the transferring activities.  Objects used were fruits and ribbons.  I like it when he listens and observe properly whenever I demonstrate what to do.  After which Vito would successfully emulate my actions.  It’s funny how he would drop the fruits whenever he transfers them from one bowl to another.  My guess is that he thinks these were balls.  We have this ball which is as small as these fruits and he loves making that bounce. 

Finally! He realized that these objects were different and started to put them nice instead of dropping.

 

And of course, we worked  with these ribbons as well. He can transfer them easily, though at times his fingers would get stuck in between the twirls. 

 

The week before, we had red… now we have yellow!  Objects in the basket are: book, Duplo giraffe, yellow colour card, Playskool barrel, ring stacker, squeezable cube, yellow shirt and rattle.

I would just place this basket in the sitting room where he can see it all the time and explore it.  Oh by the way, I realised it would be BEST to put on a yellow shirt as well!! And he picks the book first.  And later on spilled his brother’s LEGOs, so I asked him to pick some up and put it in the box.  He obliged!  Early training for cleaning up LOL!                  

                           

No cutting and gluing here, simply finger painting.  I used two colours this time (Red and Yellow) to show the difference. 

This was supposedly a transfer activity of utensils but he ended up using them as drums and cymbals. So yes! Making music using plates and kitchen utensils, why not?

                       

Lots of out door activity this week because we were blessed with a good weather!  Time to practice those motor skills!