Learning about Flowers

I reused our dining table flowers and pulled out a flower themed activity last week.


I made him dissect the flowers and I was so happy to see him in awe discovering what the flower is made up.  Using the Flower Nomenclature cards, we first identified the parts using the real flower that we have.  For me, it would be easier for him to grasp the concept if we use real flowers instead of just playing around with the printables.


I talked about the parts as we took each card, and the role it plays in the whole plant system.  When we’re done exploring the parts and telling stories about them, we played the matching game using the nomenclature cards.  I am pretty amazed how he can easily match the labels even if he doesn’t know how to read them yet.


Then we did flower painting activities.  It’s been a long time since we had a painting activity and I was glad that he was more interested with it this time.  The moment I placed the paints in front of him, he knows exactly what to paint... clouds and trees!


I later asked him if he could paint some flowers.  He asked me to show him how to do it which I did.  A moment later, I came back to check on his work and saw this painting of a red flower.  I was speechless!  He hasn’t done any painting activity before and he came up with this!


With this I am so inspired to teach him more... more ideas on what to paint.

We will be doing more plants and flowers activity in the next few days and I hope it’ll be as fun and enjoyable as this.

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Update on our Pink Series

We’ve been religiously working on our pink series for the past week.  Thanks to Amy of Wonder Years for posting what I needed to know about Pink Series. 

In a nutshell here are the activities we should do:

Learning how to tell the TIME

My son and I had the most wonderful time learning how to read clocks and telling the time. I was able to purchase this clock board at ELC with 50% discount last Christmas and I just waited for the holidays to be over so I could teach the little one how to use it.  Then I printed out a matching game from this site, First-School Preschool Activities and Crafts, to go along with our lesson.  You can also check this Write & Wipe Demonstration Clock from Amazon US as an alternative learning clock.

First thing, I talked about the clock and how it’s long and short hands works, and telling him that it is the hands that tell us the time.  Then I demonstrated how we read the HOUR through the hand’s position.  He was listening intently which really surprised me.  Then, I showed him how to ‘read’ the clock using it’s hands.  So I demonstrated this by configuring the hands and telling him what time it is set on.  Halfway through, he figured it out so instead of me, telling what time it is... I would just set the hands and would ask him “What time does the clock say?”

I guess it’s not that complicated because he got everything right.  In fact, he insisted that he can do it by himself.  So here he is, doing the manipulation of the hands and would ask me what time does it say!  He’s like that these days... likes to play my role :)

These clock cut-outs were also taken from the penguin activity which I downloaded. Here, I set up the clock and he would look for the match using the printables.

For another matching game, I made him match the clocks to the appropriate time indicated in the penguin card. He only did a few cards though... might be tired already from all the drills we did previously.

So currently, we’re only learned the concept of the “time on the hour”. I will introduce the minutes and seconds as he progress.  As a followup activity on learning about clocks you can check this other post, The Clock.

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Color Mixing

Our first activity for 2012!

I’ve been wanting to introduce this to Mavi for a loooonnnggg time but I’m always hesitant.  You know why?  He doesn’t have his own table and chair yet! So that’s what we gave him last Christmas.  Mind you, this is his 3RD table set. As you know, we’ve been moving countries from the past 2 years, so the first one was left in Belgrade and the second was given to my nephew in Singapore.  Thus, this is the third and hopefully the last!

Going back... I placed his table set in the kitchen since we will be dealing with water.  I bought food coloring (naturals are washable) from the grocery store and poured a few drops of primary colors on the ice tray.  I told him we’ll be mixing colors and see what colors we can come up with.  Oh boy, he was so so excited!

First I mixed blue and yellow... and he shouted “It’s green!”.  Then I asked him what happens if we mix yellow and orange(I did this while I mix the colors), and we came with orange and he shouted “It’s orange Mama!”.  We did the same with purple as well.

Then he asked if he can do color mixing on his own. He was experimenting a lot of colors!  He even came up with a grey color.

By the way, I used a medicine dropper.  So aside from teaching him all about color mixing, I was also demonstrating how to use a medicine dropper... that we can use it to transfer water from one container to another.  He struggled at first... but I kept on saying “squeeze and release” whenever he would dip it on the water.  I made him practice a few times as he was frustrated that he can’t get any water into the dropper.  Well, he was persistent so he finally figured out how it works.

  

I also made him do this... putting water drops on marks using medicine dropper.  Well, it’s his first time so he still can’t control the water coming out of the dropper.  But he loved doing this.  One time when we did this activity again, he made a car using the medicine dropper.

 

Just a note, I discovered that some food coloring can stain your hands.  I bought a  Natural food coloring for red and yellow, thus the one that stained on my son’s hands is blue color.

Happy mixing!