Navajo Cheerios Painting

We’re currently working on our North America unit.  To understand a little bit of American history, we made this “cheerios” painting.  This idea came from this book: 

It contains lots of comprehensive introduction to American history, a peek at what the people eat and drinks, how they are dressed, their beliefs and how society was organized.  Among the projects in the this book, my son picked the designing of a Navajo.

It is said that healers from the Navajo tribe create paintings using colored sand.  And it is believed that these creations had the power to cure illness.  

Because we don’t have colored sand, we pulverized cheerios.  

Now I made a design in an art paper.  I placed the cheerios in a muffin paper.  As a guide, I place number on the shapes that are going to have the same color.  Then spread glue into the shapes of color number 1.

I made my son cover the glue using the desired powderized cheerios.  We did this with the rest of the shapes/colors. He loves filling the glue with cheerios, he was very particular with the colors mixing.  I was telling him it’s okay because it’s unavoidable.

              

I just love seeing little hands in action! 

His favorite part, lifting the paper and shaking off the excess powders.

We let it dry for a few hours and here’s what we ended up with.  A Navajo tribe healing painting :)

Happy crafting!

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Internal Organs: Puzzle and Nomenclature Cards

This is my last post of my Human Body series.

After we go about the internal organs, I made my son do this puzzle which I bought when we were in Singapore.  It’s actually an eraser LOL and I got it for less than a dollar :) He loves puzzles!

              

 

And then we worked on the nomenclature cards which I got from Montessori Print Shop.

Hope you enjoy our Human Body unit study!  Hope to be more creative the next time we visit this unit ;)

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Internal Organs of the Human Body

This is the second part of our unit study of the Human Body.  After we have formed our Skeletal System, I introduced to Mavi the internal organs of the human body.  We started with the brain of course...

BRAIN.  I printed a black and white image of the brain and colored it to save ink.  I talked about how important the our brain is, how it controls every senses we have and affects how we think or respond to certain event.  And I added that it is very delicate that’s why we should avoid banging our head so as not to damage the brain.

              

LUNGS.  Our lungs looked funny because they were too small LOL.  Important thing for him to remember her is that we use our lungs to breath. 

              

Then I showed him how lungs work using a plastic.  He can’t resist though and wanted to try it too.

HEART.  Heart pumps the blood in our body and that it produces a beating sound.  This part he loves the most... listening to my heartbeat! I just hope he still recognizes that sound... he’s listening to it for months while he’s in womb :)

LIVER, STOMACH, INTESTINES.  This part seems a little complicated to him.  I just described this system on a level of a 4yr old :)

BLADDER.  The organ that holds the urine (waste water) is the bladder.  He’s interested with it because he’s always curious how and why he urinates.

These are the basic organs that I think are essential for my son to learn as he keeps on asking about his body.  I think it’s not that much though... I just picked the ones I know his brain can digest easily.  We’ll definitely revisit this subject next year! 

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The Skeletal System

My son has been fascinated with the human skeletal system.  He’s been singing Dem Bones for months now and enjoys the skeleton dance.  With this, I decided to throw a human body system unit so he can have an overview of what he is made of.

There’s the books which I got from the library.  I am so thankful for our wonderful library, they have an amazing collection of fiction and non fiction books for kids!

Learning about LINES

My son enjoyed making different lines using marker pens.  Next would be using paints :)

Source:  The ABCs of Art

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A Visit to the Zoo

A few weeks ago, we visited the city zoo.  Mavi has been asking about it for a long time now and since husband was on leave we just have to grab the opportunity see the animals while it’s still summer.

We have been to 4 zoos in the past three years, and they’re all in different places.  Will tell you about it soon.  And by far, he enjoyed this one the most.   I love the zoo, and it’s not just my son who enjoys seeing the animals but its me and my husband too.  Just like this one, it’s our first encounter with a white rhinos and gorillas.  We were so enthralled!  They were even more beautiful in person rather than in books!

                  

The zoo has mini-conservatories as well.  They have this house that preserves the furs of lions and tigers.  My son had a great time ‘feeling’ their furs.  

         

And they have displays of some animal skulls.  Here they have the skulls of zebra, giraffe, chimpanzee, crocodile etc.

And of course, what made my son even more happier is encountering a human skeleton!! He loves it to bits!

 

Then before we headed home, we passed by the “Farm” area... and here kids are allowed to feed the farm animals.  Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the cow milking session.  My son would have like participating on it :)  Oh well, maybe next time.

 

I don’t usually share or talk about our trips because I wanted to keep it private.  But some readers have asked me if there are some things that we also do aside from homeschool activities. 

Of course we do have a lot of fun things whenever the weather permits!! Whenever it’s safe to go outside (am talking about the weather), we definitely go out and play some ball, or go to playgrounds, or somewhere else other than the 4 corners of our house LOL.  We travel as well too. 

Anyway, will share about it soon.

Happy Thursday everyone!

3D Shapes

We had a short vacation last week thus the absence of homeschool activities. We had so much fun exploring the beautiful sites of the north, visited the zoo and a lot more.  Will share it here soon!

Anyway, Mavi and I made some models for our 3D shapes lesson.  But it seems that the little guy was more interested in making cards for his friends and applying glitter glues on it.

              

                

We waited for it to dry up. And here they are...

Too bad I couldn’t make a sphere!  As you can see, my son wrote letters on it LOL.  We sorted out the printables that I got from Montessori Printshop.

Using these models, I’m happy that he can now distinguish 3d shapes with the plain ones.  And it is surprising that he memorizes the name of all the models that we created!

 

Source:  Patterns for the 3D models are all from Paper Models of Polyhedra

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Planets and the Solar System

Saw this book from the library and I thought my son would like it.

 

And he did!  The book got lots of interesting images of the planets and is loaded of information which are very easy for an almost 4 yr old to understand.  I also love that each planet were discussed and has trivia on each one.

                        

Later we made planets using paints.   As we paint each planet, we first refer to the book, discuss the color and try mixing the paints so we can come up with the exact color as presented in the book. And this is how they look like as we wait for them to dry up.

Once they’re cooked, I cut them up so we can glue them on a black cardstock.  They look absolutely perfect!

My son started cutting the orange paper for his Sun.

Then we glue them on the cardstock.  We talk about the order  of the planets in the solar system as we glue them.  Here it seen that he is adding glitters on our space. 

 

Then we waited again for them to dry so we can start playing with it using our Safari Space Toob.

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AUGUST PLANS

Here are some of the few things we needed to do before the September.  My son will start school next month and is enrolled in a Montessori class.  Though he will be in school in the morning,  we still have the afternoon to do home “school” if he asks for it (he doesn’t watch TV), or when we can’t play outside because of bad weather. 

LANGUAGE.  We’re still in Montessori blue series... currently finishing the secret words, then will be doing some sentence strips and last would be the word list.  I hope we can finish this by end of August so we can start with the green series by September.

MATH.  I’m using worksheets as a guide. But I used Montessori-Inspired Math activities first then once he can grasp the idea I supplement it using worksheets. 

SCIENCE.  This really depends on what I could find from the library and mostly the subject depends on the season.

GEOGRAPHY.  We’ll be doing North America this month and hope to finish the rest of the continents by the end of the year.

RELIGION.  This is something I have yet to add in our curriculum.  Currently, we’re just reading Bible stories for children. I am not worrying about this since Mavi will be enrolled in a Catholic school next year.

I am currently working on our curriculum/schedule for September.  Since he’ll be in school for at least 3.5hrs, I wouldn’t want to load him with so much work here at home, he can play as long as he wants but in case he gets tired of playing and wanted to do something else.... then perhaps we can do some home “schooling”.