ASIA Unit Study 2014

It always excites my son to study Asia.  For some reason, he finds this continent so mysterious.  As I said before, maybe it’s because of the diversity in culture, people and lifestyle.  We came from the Philippines and in a short time we stayed in Singapore.  Mavi even attended a Chinese school and yes at 2 years old he can speak a few Chinese :D  So Mavi was exposed to the different culture and people but he was young then, so he couldn’t appreciate it yet.

Anyway, here are the materials/activities I prepared for Mavi for this year’s study.  This is just Asia in general, I have separate post for each study of the Asian regions.

MAP WORKS

A review of the Asia Map.  We are also doing a puzzle map similar to this activity. 

Presentation and work of the Asian Regions. Asia is divided into 6 regions, namely:  Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Central Asia and North Asia (Russia).  Here we identified major countries of each regions and place the Asia Pin Flags to plot their location.  Mavi also worked on the 3-part card of the Asian regions.

 

HABITAT

Study of Animals of Asia and Habitats. 

Below is a worksheet for Mavi to work plotting the appropriate habitat.

ANIMALS OF ASIA

The study of habitat is side by side with our animal study.  We use the cards to look into the animals and sort them out whether they live in a rainforest, desert or grassland. 

In addition, we made animal skin prints similar to Africa Study.

           

 

Now this study won’t be complete without learning about the treasures of Asia.  We used the Natural Resources of the World cards for this.  In the set-up I placed papers and a pen to write/draw the end products of Asia’s resources.

 

ASIAN CUISINE

Now this is part of daily life as this what I always prepare at home (Asian Cuisine cards).  I just have to emphasize to Mavi from what country our meal of the day came from.

     

Coming up… Southeast Asia!

More activities from here:

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

 

Linking to:

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Religious Crafts and Activities for Kids

Sharing with you some religious crafts we did to go along with our study of Religions in Asia. 

Hinduism

Hindus offer garlands to God and to their guests as a sign of welcome.  Our garland was made of tissue paper and I used a thread to tie them up all together to form a garland.

 

Mavi decorated his hand.  This is a Hindu tradition wherein a Hindu bride would decorate its hand with a red dye called mehndi on her wedding day.

Christianity

One of the poignant moment in Christianity is the death of Jesus Christ.  So here, we made Mount Cavalry using paper plates and paint and added three crosses.  This is where Jesus died with two other outlaws.

  

Islam

We made prayer rug used by the Muslims when they worship Allah.  Instead of making a stunning and complicated design which Muslim craftspeople are known of, we just weaved our rug using cardstock.

              

Seen below, Mavi demonstrates how it is used.

Using Legos, we made a model of a Muslim mosque.  We used a styro paper cup and top it with a crescent symbol for the dome.  to signify an Islam mosque. Mavi loved this one the most!

 

Hope you enjoy this post.  More of our Asian Unit Study coming your way.  Till next time!

More Asia Unit in my Pinterest Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

Linking to:

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Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

Religions in Asia (with Resources)

Last week we started our Asia Unit Study by looking at the different beliefs and religions of the Asians.    Click the link of the image for the product details.

We started off with the presentation of materials and an overview of each religion. 

Most of my learning materials come with fact cards. If you might be wondering why, I use these cards as a tool for reading practice for Mavi.  At times books are not available and these cards come in handy.

Speaking of books, our library has the best resource for this :)  My favourite so far are the books from World of Faiths series.  I HIGHLY recommend them if you are looking for books that teaches religion.  They are so engaging, easy to read, very informative but not overwhelming to little ones and it has suggested activities to go along with the specific religion of study.

The books on the series are the following [aff. links]:

• Christianity
• Hinduism
• Judaism
• Sikhism
• Islam
• Buddhism

These are really wonderful wonderful books.  If I have the resources, I would want them all.  They’re treasures! My son reads them every night.

Now, with the books and cards… I printed a map of Asia and Mavi and I tried to mark the places based on their religions.  And look what happened when Mavi encountered the YinYang symbol… he labeled it as Kung Fu Panda LOL. 

  

My next post would be about the craft activities that goes along with this study. So stay tuned!

In addition, we also watched videos of the important celebrations of the three major religions:  Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

Christianity:  Easter and Christmas. Here we watched the death and resurrection of Christ.

 

Islam:  Observance of Eid-ul-Fitr

 

 

Hinduism:  Celebration of Diwali, the Festivity of Lights.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

Teaching Ordinal Numbers

Earlier today, while all of us are so lazy to start our day, we read Chicken Licken while having breakfast.  Mavi started to memorize the order of the farm animals in the story and I decided to integrate ordinal numbers into it. 

Our Chicken Licken was from Usborne and got it via Book Depository.  The animals used is from Safari Toob Mega Farm Collection and Safari Toob Feathered Dinosaurs. [aff. links]

I made Mavi read the book and instructed to place the animals in the order of how they appeared in the story. So basically, if your child knows how to read and at this time, familiar with ordinal numbers he can work on this independently with minimal supervision.  But for preschoolers, the mother/teacher should demonstrate the concept of ordinal numbers by placing the animals according to the sequence of their appearance in the story.

PS. We didn’t have a turkey figure so we didn’t include it in our activity.

 

Other books that can be used in teaching ordinal numbers [aff. links]:

• Are You My Mother?
• Brown Bear Brown Bear
• A Very Hungry Caterpillar
• The Very Busy Spider

Another way to demonstrate ordinal numbers is by using similar objects (in our case dinosaurs), labels and instructions.

Mavi reads the instructions and happily obliged.  My instructions were simple… like “place a yellow rubber-band on the 4th (fourth) dinosaur”.

You can find more Math activities on my Pinterest Board:

 

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Math Ideas on Pinterest.

FREE Spelling Worksheets for Letter Sounds ‘i, p, n’

Sharing more Spelling Worksheets for Letter Sounds I, P, and N. You can download the activity sheets by clicking the individual pictures below.  You can read the post, FREE Spelling Worksheets for Letter Sounds ‘s, a, t’ to know more on how we use them.
          
         
         
Enjoy!

Learning From Books Using Narration Style Method

We are currently doing Charlotte Mason narration style at home.  We used to do Before Five In A Row (B4FIAR), where my son had a great time doing all the activities related to the book.  The only problem is, they have a book list and most books in the list are out of print.  With the narration style, we can use any book available and attack it the Charlotte Mason way :)

 

So without further ado, my first specimen is my son’s favourite book Where the Wild Things Are (Amazon US) (Book Depository)[aff. link].  We read it, pin pointed the words he couldn’t understand (for vocabulary lesson) and I took down notes as well for words worthy of spelling practice.

First activity is the Story Sequence using pictures.  I scanned and printed pictures from the book and had Mavi arranged them.  And then, I asked him to tell me the story (in his own word) using the pictures.  I couldn’t believe he remembers 70% of the lines from the book!

 

Spelling and Vocabulary.  Then we moved on to the spelling and vocabulary.  By this time I ran out of ink so I just have to rely on my papers and sharpies LOL (I don't run out of ink these days and I always print in high quality thanks to our ECO Tank Printer from EPSON).  For vocabulary, I have him read the definitions (practice reading) and then the meaning.  He figured out that he needs to match them.  The same with the spelling, decoding the scrambled letters to form the right words.

              

Story Sequencing using Words.  We’re doing the sequencing using words only.  This is to practice his reading analysis and skills.

Creating and Acting.  After the oral narration, we printed graphics from Making Learning Fun and colored them so we could make them as puppets.  This approach is similar to our Hickory Dickory Duck Unit. 

And here they are!  To assess, I made him retell the story (this was on a separate day) using the puppets and vocabulary words. 

I was so happy that we did this!! I have never seen Mavi become interested in “home” schooling again (he’s on vacation mode LOL).  He even told me “Mommy, can we do this again?”. 

So yes! We are doing this every week.  Now I am excited for our next book narration.

Books for Toddlers: Baby Picture Books

NOTE:  The post contains affiliate links.

My books from Book Depository finally arrived! So happy to have these picture books again :)

 

Baby’s First Colours

Baby’s First Words

Baby’s First Farm

Baby’s First Food

Baby’s First Animals

I looove these baby books, I have them when Mavi was 8 months old and I knew I just have to have them again for Vito. I couldn't find this in our local bookstore so I needed to purchase them from Book Depository as I no longer have Mavi's. In the picture below is Mavi. At that time the book is a year older already and the pages are torn due to excessive use :)  There are 12 books in the series but I bought have 5 due to a  limited budget LOL.

 

Now here are the reasons why I love and recommend this book series:

1. These board books are sturdy. I like its cover the most. It's wrapped with plasticky material, padded and soft, reason why my son loves to bite them :D If its wet with saliva the cover doesn't come off and tear.

2.  The board pages are highly durable. They don't bend and my little boy can flip it easily.

           

 

3.  It has large real pictures thus it holds my son’s interest. He can easily discern on it because of the pictures' size and simplicity. We love looking at them everyday.

4.  The book uses bright colors as backgrounds. Vito is drawn to it especially those with red, yellow and blue backgrounds. There are 12 books in the series and I bought 5. These are tried and tested. I recommend them to babies as young as 4 months :)

  

These books would also be perfect as presents! 

Books for Artists Study

I miss our Artist Study.  Mavi enjoyed our Artist Study sessions.  This was when there was no Vito yet and when my hands are not full :)   Mavi is very much intrigued on the lives of some greatest artists, he loves to listen to their life stories and the paintings that they made.  I have attempted this a million times, to reboot this lessons but the baby is a big factor. We’ll just have to set this aside and revisit this once Vito can join us.

Now I made this post to introduce two sets of books that Mavi and I really really love and enjoyed reading.  I found these in our library… but of course they don’t have the complete set which I dream of owning someday.  They are for keeps :)

The first set of the books are from James Mayhew. The books are all about Katie, who loves to visit museums with her grandma and when no one is watching, the paintings come alive.  My son loves this idea of Katie going inside the painting and meeting the characters on it.    We’ve read some of it and here are our favourites arranged according to how much we like them.

 

• Katie’s Picture Show 
• Katie and the Waterlily Pond
• Katie and the Impressionist
• Katie and the Starry Night
• Katie and the Sunflowers
• Katie and the Spanish Princes
• Katie and Monalisa
• Katie and the Dinosaurs

The second set of books that we also love are from Laurence Anholt.  This time the stories are all about children meeting great artists.  The books are more focused on the artist’s life rather than the paintings they’re made.  Now these books are pretty popular in the library so they are seldom available.  I plan to purchase them as gifts later on.  As I said, these books are worth-it.

Books we’ve read from the series:

             

• Camille and the Sunflowers
• Degas and the Little Dancer
• Leonardo and the Flying Boy
• Picasso and the Girl with a Ponytail

And there you go, my picks for studying great artists.  Hope you checkout the books using my affiliates.  Don’t worry, you won’t be charge or there’s no additional cost.  I will just earn a teeny weeny commission if you order through my links (affiliates).  And don’t hesitate to get your books from Book Depository because it is FREE DELIVERY NATIONWIDE.

Thank you and hope that this post helps.