Color Theory Part II

We continued our activities on colors and this time, we discuss how tertiary colors are produced using primary and secondary colors.  (Color Theory Part I here)

I took out the rest of Crayola paints that we have and printed out the Color Wheel worksheets from Spell Out Loud.  Again, we used cotton swabs instead of paint brushes.

Here we started filling up the primary and secondary colors in the wheel.

I used this glass that we have to mix the colors.  As you can see on the left side, he wanted to see whether the orange paint matches the orange color he produced out of mixing red and yellow.  We did this comparison to the rest of the colors in the wheel.

 

We completed the wheel but eventually he complained that he’s tired (more on BORED actually).

So right on the spot I cut out small papers and showed him some color mixing activity.  He enjoyed it to bits!  He keeps on guessing the abstract image that we produced.

Look at all these lovely colors!  You should try this at home :)

I made these little butterflies.  My son wanted to hang them in his room, brilliant idea!

Happy Monday!

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner

Plans for April

I’m trying to make my plans simple this month to make it achievable. 

Language. Wrapping-up Green Series by reviewing phonograms.  This also means a visit to the library to pick-up some reading books (age appropriate) with digraphs and phonograms for Mavi to practice.

Math. We’ll focus on addition this month, putting away worksheets for awhile.  We’ll do some writing/spelling practice as well (numbers in words)

Geography.  My son’s class are having South America this month, but since we’ve done it already…. we’ll do Europe this month.

Science.  Since its springtime, we’ll have animals and their youngs (animal farm families), birds and life cycles.

Art.  We’re doing Color Theory.

This is more than enough for this month LOL.  Oftentimes, we skipped some activities because we spend our afternoons outdoors when the weather is really nice.  I still prefer the outdoors, exploring things, him running around, scooting and climbing trees, playing with his friends and spending some time at the library as well.

Green Series Picture Sorting

We’re wrapping up our Green Series (Montessori Language) this month and we're doing a little bit of review.  I can’t think of anything else so I made him “sort” the pictures according to its phonogram (phoneme).

We started with “th, sh, and ch”.  For the child to correctly sort them, he or she has to say out the name of each picture and properly pronounce three digraphs.

Then we proceeded with “i_e, a_e and o_e”.

The “ee” and “ea” challenged him.  Well to tell you frankly, it’s difficult for a 4 yr old to tell the sound difference between “ee” and “ea”.  Even I cannot explain the difference.  Ideas and inputs from you will be greatly appreciated!

I’ll be creating worksheets soon so we can do lots of practice on this one.  We’ve just finished our CVC Worksheets (Pink Series Montessori Language) and will soon move to Blue Series, practice spelling and review digraphs.

If you are interested with my CVC Worksheets you can check it out here.

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Color Theory Part I

Helloooo!! How’s everyone??? I haven’t been in this blog for a week!  Oh well, it must be the Easter vacation hangover or probably enjoying much of our Spring break :)

I’m participating in this Spring Blog Hop, it sounds fun!  That is why we did colors today to jumpstart our Spring activities :) 

I decided to take this one slow, so we only did two color schemes and skipped the colorwheel.  I’m using the The ABC’s of Art to discuss the primary and secondary colors (we’ll be doing other colors next).  So I took our red, yellow and blue paints to create secondary colors.  I made use of cotton buds LOL as our paint brushes.  Since we’ll just be mixing paints, it would save me a lot of work since I can dispose them easily rather than using paint brushes where I have to wash them after we use them.

Mine is on the upper portion.  I made sure to have my own work too… and surprisingly, I enjoyed it!

With all colors available (primary and secondary), we made a rainbow :)  These are the colors that makes a rainbow in order from the colorwheel.

This is my son’s version of rainbow colors.

Next, we’ll do the colorwheel and study other color schemes like complimentary colors, warm and cool colors, and maybe neutral colors as well.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday 
Teach Beside Me
Montessori Spring Blog Hop

Volcanoes! (FREE Picture Cards!)

My son's class worked on volcanoes a few weeks ago.  They talked about Mt. Vesuvius and watched videos of the eruption.  During their circle time they made a volcano and made it erupt.  He can’t stop talking about it for days!

Anyway, he was begging me to do it at home so I just have to give in.

But first we looked at pictures of volcanoes around the world and talked about “active” volcanoes.  You can DOWNLOAD the file for FREE from our SUBSCRIBER PAGE.

If you are not yet a subscriber, click here to SUBSCRIBE and get direct access to our growing list of FREE printables.

Repurposing Flashcards: Shapes and Colors

When Mavi was about 1, I had these flashcards which was given to me by a friend.  I couldn’t find any use for them at that time because Mavi wasn’t into flashcards.  He easily gets bored with them.  So what I did was use it as a control card for sorting. 

First I made a replica of all the shapes in the cards using a cardstock.  I made sure that the shape cut-outs will have the same color and size to the ones on the flash cards.  

 

Then I presented the cards to Mavi as I introduce the shapes.  I started with only 2 or 3 shapes so he won’t get overwhelmed.    Then as I place the cut-outs, I instructed him to match them with flashcards. 

It was really interesting because I’ve witnessed the level concentration my son had on sorting.  He examined the shapes well, eyeing each card carefully  then cautiously place the cut-outs on the correct control card.  I didn’t interfere, I just sat there and observe him as he sorted out the shapes.  There were instances he gets confused, then that’s the time I offered my assistance.  And as he progressed, he started developing his own technique in sorting, which as really an amazing thing to watch from a 1.5 years old. 

So you might want to try this in case you have excess flashcards and have no idea on how to repurpose it in your home “school”.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
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Preschool Corner

Color Your Homeschool with Pasta!

So there’s so much you cian do with pasta :)  It was once a favorite learning tool in our home. Since I’m quite frugal, I barely give him toys from stores unless necessary, instead I made use of what we in kitchen (LOL) to save money and to be practical as well.

With that said, I made these colorful (rainbow) pasta when Mavi was just a teeny weeny.  We used it in so many ways! And here’s how I done it:

Gather various shapes of pasta like bowtie, penne, Rotelle, macaroni, shells etc.  Then measure the right amount of pasta you wanted to use and put them in a zipper bag (Ziploc).  Add around 1 tablespoon of alcohol and 5-10 drops of food coloring into the bag.  Close the bag, and mix (shake the bag) until everything is covered with color.  Leave the pasta inside the bag for 5-10 minutes.  To dry them up, cover a tray with cookie sheet or kitchen towel.  Carefully pour the colored pasta and spread them in single layer.  And that’s just about it!

 

So here’s how we use them:

1.  For color sorting activity.  I have this egg carton box which I painted with watercolor :)  He matches the pasta to that of the color in the egg box.

           

2.  Stringing and Beading.  Good for penne pasta :)

        

3. Playdough Tower

       

4.  Counters.  Again using an egg carton box as our tray.  I wrote numbers at the bottom of the box and he’ll put the right amount of pasta based on the number written. 

      

Those rainbow pasta are really beautiful!  How I miss them :)

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
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Preschool Corner

Counting by Tens

Hello readers! I mentioned earlier in my previous post that we will be doing A LOT of  math activities for this month.  With that, we started with skip counting. 

Based on my experience, this is something he is not really interested with.  So to get his attention I used his favorite toy (Lego) to demonstrate counting by tens.

First I made him stack 10 square Legos which he gladly did. I explained that 1 stack of Lego consist of 10 Lego squares. 

And I proceeded with 2 stacks of Lego.  Explained that there are 2 tens now, and 2 tens is twenty all in all.

 

And I made him put 3 stacks of Legos, asked him how many tens are there.  He counted the stacks and answered 3.  Then I explained that 3 tens is thirty.

We did this till we reached 80 because I ran out of Legos.  LOL.

And then we counted the numeral numbers by tens. I really don’t expect him to grasp the concept yet.  I just want him to be familiar with skip counting, that there are “shortcuts” in counting, that we don’t have to count each Lego squares one by one because it would be tiring. 

Now we’ll do counting by 2’s and 3’s next which I think he is more familiar with since I count by 2’s whenever we tidy up his animal figures.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
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Teach Beside Me

FREE Numbers and Letters Playdoh Mats

I’m currently cleaning up my hard drives and I came across old files that were used during Mavi’s toddler homeschooling years :) Some of which are these Playdoh mats which I customized because I wanted something plain, smaller and requires less ink. So what I did was to create my own version, and I added number Playdoh mats as well.

So if you are interested, you can grab a copy of it for FREE by clicking the links below.  And if someone wishes to have a copy kindly direct them back here to my site. Enjoy!
Number Playdoh Mats
Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Playdoh Mats

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The City at Night

This idea was from Deep Sparkle.  This is a great activity and a perfect way to practice cutting and pasting skills.

First we made our background by creating swirls and spots.

         

Mine is on the left side and my son selected blue and purple for his background.

While we wait for our paints to dry, Mavi cut some small pieces of squares/rectangles for our windows. 

 

An hour later, we added skyscrapers to our background using black art paper (sorry no picture as my hands were busy).

Then I let my son paste the small squares  on our skyscrapers.  I explained that at night you cannot usually see the exterior of the buildings, what you see are just shadows (thus it’s black). So what you can see are the windows that are lit from inside.

Here’s Mavi’s work.  He’s still adding some details :)

 

And here’s mine.  I didn’t get to design my own skyscrapers as he did mine too LOL.

 

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
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Math and March

For this month, we will be doing more Math activities.  I admit that I’ve been neglecting it for awhile but I realize how much I miss doing it with my son while I looking at some of our previous activities.  We do Math using Singapore Math workbooks which a friend has sent me, but working with worksheets aren’t my son’s favorite thing to do.  So for March, we’ll slow down with Geography and other themed activities… instead we’ll revisit our bead works, skip counting, measuring activities, practice writing numbers, practice counting and more :)

I may pop a few artist study along the way and some painting activities.

We’ll also be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day… we might go down to the city to watch the parade :)  And we’ll be observing Lent as well, learning more about the love of Christ and how He dedicated His life teaching the word of His Father.

Have a blessed Sunday everyone!

More Dino Activities (Free Activity Sheets)

Aside from this, we also explored the world of dinosaurs through the books we borrowed from the library. 

Play the pattern game and graphing game from the dinosaur pack I downloaded from 2 Teaching Mommies.

    

Oh he loved the graphing game!  We used his Legos this time. Last year, we used easter eggs (pretend that it was dinosaur eggs!).

And there’s the playdough of course :)

Last year we also had an exciting activity, we pretended to be scientists and excavate dinosaurs using my dino sensory tub. 

Because my son loves his dino toobs so much, I made him a few more activity sheets and since I love my readers, I’m sharing it well.  It includes graphic game using some dinosaurs as seen here, and grid game sheet which my son and I enjoyed playing as well. 

                      

Enjoy!!

 

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
Preschool Corner
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Teach Beside Me

Dinosaur Cards and Worksheets (Free Printable)

Hello everyone!  My son asked me to create cards for his Safari Ltd. Dino TOOB figures, and this is what I came up with.  He was ecstatic when he saw the cards!  They’re actually fact cards for his dino figures for us to study.