Dinosaur Books!

These are ALL the books we used as reference for Dinosaur Study.  This post contains affiliated links.

• Alphabet of Dinosaurs

I highly recommend this book for preschoolers who love dinosaurs and letters at the same time. Mavi has been obsessed with the alphabet for years and he always always relates the alphabet to any object he sees.

• Killer Dinosaurs
• Sea Monsters
• Giant Dinosaurs
• Flying Monsters

These are specific books that describes dinosaurs according to characteristics. My son borrowed ALL of these books from the library.

 

• Amazing Giant Dinosaurs

I personally prefer this book, unfortunately it is only limited to giant dinosaurs. It missed out some of my son’s favourite dinos.  

Hope this post is helpful in giving you ideas on what books to use when studying dinosaurs.

Have a nice day!

Dinosaur and the Land Before Time

My son is obsessed with dinosaurs. Majority of the books he borrowed from the library is about dinosaurs.  His birthday cake was decorated with dinosaurs. So when he begged that we’ll play with dinosaurs, I couldn’t resist.  He reads his dinosaur books every night and is eager to learn all about the beginning of times.  So considering all these factors, I put up an afterschool learning activity about the geological times and the era of dinosaurs.

Here are the activities we worked on this unit study.

FREE Feathered Dinosaur Cards

Hello everyone! I made these cards ages ago and we use it to play matching game with our Safari Feathered Dinosaur Toob.  I’ll be posting our Dino Study this week for more dino-related activities that you can do with your little people.  Hope you like my cards.  Enjoy!

The Human Skeleton Book References

I’ve got lots of inquiries regarding the books we used in our human body and skeleton unit.  These books were from the library and they are amazing resources!  You can get them in Book Depository [aff.link] and they have FREE DELIVERY worldwide.

Books used were[aff.links]:

• Inside You (DK Books)
• My Body  (Flip and Flaps)
• My Body (Discover More)

Try checking them out now :)

Non-Toxic Finger Paint for Babies

I got this from a friend and this mixture is very very simple!

Mixing a plain yogurt and food coloring (I used a small amount of organic food coloring) you will produce a yummy finger paint for little babies! The activity is intended for sensorial play and I was not encouraging him to taste or eat the yogurt.  But you know that at this age, babies mouth anything.

And the good thing about it is that big brother can join as well!  And they play with it for 30 minutes (I was able to wash dishes worry free)  Two kids (and a Mommy) happy with one activity. How cool is that?

 

Bright Beaming Toddler Week 1

Mavi is 16 months old.

Theme: Cow | Vocabulary: Calf | Shape: Square | Letter: A | Number: 1 |Nursery Rhyme: Hey, Diddle Diddle

MONDAY

Theme: Cow
Vocabulary Word: Calf
I introduced the theme by showing pictures of cows from book and pictures which I printed out.  He immediately recognized the cow and said “cow” without a hint from me.  At this stage he also loves to point out letters which he recognizes like c,a and o.  So everytime we encounter the word cow, we say the sounds of the letters.  He is also proficient in speaking the world calf.  He would say it as “cahhffff”, exaggerating letter F. 

 

TUESDAY

Shape: Square
He loves looking at the picture of a square, and holding the object as well which was from Playskool Shape Sorter.  He can’t pronounce it yet, he just keeps on saying “ker”.    As part of the suggested activity, we walked around the house and looked for square objects.  We pointed to to floor tiles, counting the sides of the square and some stuff we found at the kitchen as well (biscuits).

 

 

WEDNESDAY

Letter: A
Mavi knows the letter A already, so this day was a breeze.   The activities didn't consume much of my time so I get to work some chores. I wrote the small and capital letter side to side and made him color it. The problem is that, my little boy doesn't like scribbling/shading, so after 10 seconds of holding the crayon and scribbling in any direction he immediately got bored. So I ended up doing the activity :)

 

THURSDAY

Number: 1 / One
This is the first time that I'm teaching him a number. To introduce the number, I did a similar approach to the letter A, I wrote the number 1 on a paper adding a label on it, and on the side of a paper I drew one dot. I told him "one", he said "an". I showed him the dot on the side, made him feel it by feeling the dot with his fingers on the colors.
We also wrote the number 1 over and over again on a piece of paper. I made him hold the crayons, and made him write the number 1 on a piece of paper, of course I'm doing the writing I just guide his hand.

Good thing we have this 1-2-3 toy form fitter again. He can identify the number 1 and now knows how to put the number in the right hole. Unlike before, he doesn't know what to do with this toy. So now, he keeps doing it over and over again, dropping the number 1 on the hole.

 

Friday

Nursery Rhyme:  Hey Diddle Diddle
Nothing much on nursery rhyme, it's just a repetitive recital of the poem. Even though we already have this rhyme on his book, I still printed it out and put it on the book just for documentation purposes.

 

Learning Wall

Since I haven't found a poster material, for the mean time, I used our wall for this week.

 

Montessori Practical Life 

Opening and closing the barrels.

Linking to:

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

Learning About East Asia

If you’ve been following my blog, we started our Asia Unit last month and so far we successfully completed our Southeast Asia Study.  In this post, I present to you materials and activities we worked last week for East Asia. 

Maps and Flags

As you all by now, we ALWAYS start our continent/country study with maps and flags.  This will familiarize the child of the subject’s location and each of the country’s national symbol.  For the East Asia, we identified three major countries: China, Japan and South Korea

Materials:

• Asia in a Nutshell
• Asian Flags Nomenclature Cards Pack

Again, we used Lego to recreate flags.  This activity is similar to our Southeast Asia flag activity.

Famous Landmarks

We have painting/crafts activity and Lego play.  Our tablet is very useful for this activity.  We used it to view pictures (for clear view) and watch videos related to our study. 

Materials

• Asian Landmarks Cards for other activities (3-part cards, fact cards).
• Lego
• Paints
• Pink Tissue Paper

Famous landmark for Japan is Mount Fuji

             

 

We chose Great Walls of China as our subject here.  Here we use our fact cards, which Mavi reads while we view the bigger picture in our tablet.

Calligraphy

We are using the Japanese numbers in this activity.  I painted the characters on papers and cut them for presentation.  Now Mavi has to make the characters as well.

After the activity, Mavi was like “Mom it is so difficult!”. 

 

Animals

We’ve studied Asian Animals previously, so in this activity we’re doing a Panda puzzle.  I printed this from DLTK Kids, and Mavi has to color and form the Panda according to the cheat card.

 

Arts and Crafts

We made oriental fans and learned how to make origami items.  For the oriental fans, we used paper plates, used watercolor for the background and black tempera paint for the details.  Our origami papers are homemade because the real ones are so expensive in this side of the world.  They’re colored crafts paper and I cut them to a size of 6 x 6 inches.

Books

We used lots of books, but here are my son’s favourites [aff.links]:

• Letters Around the World:  China --->> OUR FAVOURITE SERIES!
• Discover Countries:  Japan

For more Asia Unit please check my Pinterst Board Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

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History and Geography

The Making of Bahay Kubo

Here’s my attempt of presenting how we made our Bahay Kubo (Nipa Hut) project which was part of our Southeast Asia Study.

It’s pretty simple actually. What you will be needing are the following:

• strips of cardboard paper
• bamboo skewers
• double sided tape
• green cardstock (roof)

Procedure

1.  Cover the upper portion of the sticks with the double sided tape.

2.  To make a wall, stick the strips of cardboard on the two bamboo skewers. See the picture below (make two of this).  Leave a square shape in the middle for the window.

3.  To make the square house, connect the two walls using the cardboard strips again.  It should automatically stick on the bamboo skewer because of the double sided tape.  But you can add more tape if needed.  Leave a rectangle opening on the other wall for the door.

4.  For the roof, I use a cardstock, folded it and cut some strips on its end.  To make it sturdy, I glued the middle part in a cardboard paper.

            

5. To attach the roof on the house, I tape (double sided) another strip of cardboard in the middle of the roof so I can place it on top of the house using the side walls. 

           

6.  For the stairs, again it’s pretty simple. I use the double sided tape to attach all the elements in the stairs.

And that’s how we were able to come up with a Nipa Hut model.  Hope this post will give you an idea how to make your own version as well. Happy weekend!

Next Level: Patterning

Did you know that the ability to recognize pattern is one of the most important intelligence skill ? Aside from mathematics, it can also be found in behaviour, routines and in nature.

Speaking of routines, we came across this activity in our workbook of pattern relating to a series of movements of a certain object. Take for example this link cubes in a grid.  Here Mavi has to guess my next move using the patterns of how I remove the cubes from the grid. 

Amazing isn’t it? We are so used of learning patterns of numbers, colors and shapes and patterns of movements, behaviours and such didn’t even crossed my mind!

And you know what I’m thinking as well?  We can also do dancing patterns!

Now, I just wanted to share this too. As part of learning patterns, Mavi developed a “stairs”

 

Then he realised that all number combinations are number bonds or parts of number 10!

1 and 9 (violet)

2 and 8 (blue)

3 and 7 (light green)

4 and 6 (brown)

5 and 5 (black)

6 and 4 (white)

7 and 3 (red)

8 and 2 (orange)

9 and 1 (green)

He’s like “they go together!”.  I love it when he discovers and learn things on his own. Amazing!

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Home + School = Afterschool!

Early Childhood Activities (14 to 18 Months)

Hi everyone!  As promised, I am sharing with you the early childhood activities I gave to Mavi when he was about 1+ years old.  We started at 14 months and I was just giving him random activities that I know of.  It was then around 16 or 18 months that I learned about the importance of fine motor skills which they will eventually need in their preschool years and beyond.  So I made some research and started our journey in “home” schooling.

Reading Books

Now this is what we did since he was months old.  At first, we started with books for babies… simple stories, books with large pictures to capture his attention.

Pre-writing Skills

A very basic activity but very important.  This will introduce them to writing, papers, and pens.  I bought Crayola jumbo for him for this activity.  Because I started Mavi early on in writing, I never had problems with him when it came to the proper holding of a pencil or pen.

Integrating Workbooks and Hands-On Materials

With math, I use workbooks and Math Montessori Album which I purchased from KHT Montessori. In this post, I will show you how we integrate workbooks and Montessori Math.

So we start with     a workbook. As you can see we are currently reviewing the place value. Using the book, we discuss this a little bit, then close the book and prepare our Montessori materials for a hands-on activity.

In Montessori, there are a number of ways on how to present place value. I have talked about this before using the Golden Beads. This time, we used the Stamp Game tiles.  Here's my presentation of hundreds, tens and ones. Each digit can range from 0 to 9.

Then I set up an activity for Mavi to see if he was able to grasp the concept.  I don't want to overwhelm him so we only worked up to tens. The number tiles you see here is from our Hundred Boards.

After the hands-on activities and when he's ready we work on the workbooks. Adding hands-on activities to textbooks/workbooks/activity sheets makes the learning less tedious and more exciting for little fellows. So either way, workbooks or hands-on activities you'll be fine.

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Learning About Southeast Asia

Here’s a summary of activities for learning about Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia Map and Flags

This activity is all about familiarization of the Southeast Asia Map and identification of countries which belong to this region.

Learning materials used in this activity:

• Asia in a Nutshell
• Flags of Asia Pack (Nomenclature and Pin Flags)

Bahay Kubo (Nipa Hut)

Bahay Kubo is square shaped house with no divisions, just a door and windows.  It is made up of local materials such as wood or bamboo or  nipa grass.  It is a Philippine icon and represents the Filipino culture.  Note that these houses are raised, for proper ventilation I guess since the flooring is made up of bamboo.  Another reason is to avoid the flood.

Yes I have seen Bahay Kubo and have friends and relatives who used to live on this type of house.  Until now, they still exist and I can’t wait to show them to Mavi.  He has always been fascinated with Bahay Kubo. Maybe he can’t imagine how people can live on just a square house. 

Thus, I decided to create a model using cardboard boxes from Book Depository. 

There are still people who lives in this stilt houses and I can’t wait to show it to Mavi when we visit the folks this year :)

I cut out the cardboard boxes into strips then stick them on a wooden BBQ skewers.

And here’s how the skeleton  looks like when all four sides are attached.

Adding the roof which is made up of cardstock and a wooden ladder here’s the end product.

Linking to:

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