Holiday Homecoming Part II

The highlights of our stay at my parents house were the New Year's celebration and our island beach escapade. 

It is a tradition in our family to gather  and celebrate all together on New Year’s eve.  It was Mavi’s first time to party with his grandparents, uncles and aunties.. and cousins!  (Sorry can’t post family pictures for privacy :D)

Seeing a whole roasted pig for the first time.

I was teaching him how to light a sparkler!

And the little boy so interested with this horn.

After the New Year, we headed out to an island beach resort which is 4 hrs drive from home.  I really wanted Mavi to experience how we enjoy the beach in the Philippines. It’s not just about swimming in the water but doing lots of play and island adventure as well.

Making sandcastle :)

Island hopping with cousin

Beach

  

Starfish!

Cave!

 

Riding in front of the fishing boat is so much compared to being inside.  Mavi with my not so little brother.

 

Early morning walk at the beach, finding dead corals, shells and hermit crabs!

                   

Oh we are missing all of these already!! 

My son suffered separation anxiety for awhile. But I comforted him that we’ll have lots of family adventures here as well once it is springtime. I know its different with other families and relatives around, but we can’t do anything about it since they’re millions miles away from us. I love it that Mavi appreciated the trip, that he was able to appreciate the presence of other family  members and felt the love that they have for him (and his brother). 

Now I can’t wait to go back! LOL

Toddler Beginnings 03

Toddler activities for 2015! We’re starting the year with blue colour (although for 2015 the colour is green?)!.  For our reading, we have two books this week that we kept on reading every day (when big brother is not home so as NOT to be distracted).  Vito is starting to have longer attention span on books so we can read multiple books in one sitting these days.  What’s funny though is that I end up singing the Brown Bear book instead of reading it.

We’ve got loads of this! We started with scribbling.  While on vacation, I observed that Vito is becoming fond of scribbling.  So I took our all different kinds of writing materials in our doodle drawer for him to explore. You can see below, we have the Crayola Pip Squeaks, Do-a-Dot (with supervision as this is NOT water washable), Crayola Egg Crayon and this writing magnet which we got as a freebie at Emirates (he loves this!).

Observing the little one on how to use some of these materials, he always started writing using his left. I am not sure yet if this is a sign of being left handed, but I still encourage him to use his right.  See the upper-left picture? He also uses both hands!  It’s amazing that at his age he seems to know how to properly grip the pen LOL. And of course, we still use the buttons… and he uses both hands alternatively.

                          

And we started using the barrels.  I planned this for stacking activity but he likes using it for open and close activity.   His first attempt was the red barrel which is the smallest one.    

Then he started to open the yellow which is a little bit bigger than the red.

When he got tired of opening and closing the barrels, I tried showing him how to stack the barrels and I caught him doing it as well :)  Nice try!  

For our artsy this week, we used his favourite toy as a medium for painting.

Creating car prints was fun! But he loved touching the paints using his finger much more.

Much of our our music adventures are not seen here, because we listen to music and doing lots of action songs as well.  Occasionally, we use random materials to create music.  Seen below is a cookie tin can lid (drum) and sharpies which we use as a drum set.

 It is winter as of the moment, and the weather is negative outdoors so for the meantime, we are stuck at home and doing sensorial activities instead using natural materials LOL.  He was eating this banana for breakfast, but when he had enough, he started playing with them.  He squashed them!  Oh those fingers are so strong!  This is such a wonderful activity for those little fingers eh?

                      

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Holiday Homecoming Part I

As you all know, family and I went home last month to celebrate Christmas and New Year with the family in our homeland.  I've always wanted Mavi to experience how it's like to celebrate the holidays at home, to be with grandparents, cousins and relatives and to enjoy the local sights and festivities.

So allow me to share some pictures from our trip. First stop, the in-laws!

Zoocobia
We always visit the zoo whenever we go places. And we’re so lucky that there’s a new zoo located near my in-laws place.  Because we were considered as “VIP”, we get to have our own tour guide and had a close encounter with most of the animals in the zoo. 

Here we get to….

Hold a parrot

   

Get lost in the Garden Maze

          

Go Carting

Feed the ostrich

 

Feed the monkey

 

Feed a camel, goat, and donkey

And see in person the animal that produces one of the most expensive coffees in the world, the wild civet. 

Sky Ranch
We love that there was a night carnival in town!  First time for Mavi to be out at night (not in the cold), and enjoying the carnival ride!

Dinosaur Island
Saving the best for last, we visited the newly established Dinosaur Island, just a few minutes from the in-law’s place.  Mavi's obsessed with dinosaurs and he was ecstatic upon arrival!

The Dinosaur Island is right in the middle of a rainforest, and that dinosaur statues were so impressive! It's like an outdoor museum of dinosaurs, and even if their animation and sound effects were limited, Mavi and the entire had a wonderful time viewing the elect... dinosaurs.

Aside from these sights, we get to visit relatives as well. After celebrating Christmas at my in-laws house, we travelled again for a day via a domestic flight going to my folk’s house to spend the New Year. Pictures coming up for Part II!

Montessori Practical Life: Folding Clothes

We're back from our 3 weeks vacation and it was amazing! Now I'll save details on a separate post, for now allow me to show you how Mavi has been very helpful for the past few days.  I give credit to the years of training of practical life activities based on Maria Montessori philosophy.

The traditional work in the family is known as the practical life work and is the most important area of an education for  life. These practical life activities provides children the  groundwork for physical, mental and social development.   And what’s more important is that it’ll teach them the work habits that will lead to success in academic and in all aspects of life later.

One of the chores I dread doing is folding the laundry.  My husband usually do this for me, but since he's busy most of the time, the folding doesn't get done and the laundry would pile up at times.  Now this is where Mavi comes in handy.  I gave him the responsibility of folding his own clothes, sort and put them directly in his closet.

To start with,  Mavi would sort his own clothes from the pile of laundry.

I placed masking tape on his shirt, pants and underpants and these serves as a guide for folding.  There's a number on the tape to indicate which one he will fold first. 

He enjoys folding as he finds the approach “scientific” due to the order of how you fold a piece.

For now, I’m giving him the task to fold his own clothes. Once he masters this, then he can fold his little brother’s clothes.

 

At the end, he's happy that he was able to help, felt accomplished and proud that he was able to contribute something for Mommy.

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This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

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12 Practical Life Christmas Activities: On the 5th day…

Painting a Monet-inspired Christmas tree.

Remember how I raved about the books of James Mayhew (the Katie series)? We'll one of our favourite books is the Katie Meets the Impressionist [aff. link]. We talked about the style of Monet and why he is called an “impressionist” artist.

 

And since its Christmas, we use the Christmas tree as an inspiration.

Below, we work together all the time. His and hers.

We dabbed and smeared our drawing paper with green for the tree. He used a pencil to draw a triangle outline as guide which is not visible in the picture.  Then we added details for the balls, lights, stars and presents under the tree.

 

Here’s my tree.

 

Mavi’s tree.

Now here’s a macro look of our tree…