Toddler Beginnings 05

Happy Monday to all! My not so little Vito is starting to show signs that he can do a lot more with fine motor skills now than before! How cool is that? And for this series, may I say that he has his own favourites already?  Come take a look!We do endless reading at home.  Was surprise that he chooses his own book now.  And obviously, based on the pictures he enjoys reading the Spot series with me!  These books are from the library but you can get them from Book Depository[aff.link].  They’re so easy to read and engaging.  These are lift-the-flap books and yes he enjoys lifting the flap! He would nod his head if its not Spot :)  The Animal book is a board book which I got last year.  Vito loves animals and I just have to include this board book for animal recognition.  He would say “raaawrr” whenever he sees animals on books, pictures or toys!

For our colour basket I’m featuring the red colour because of Valentines Day. A discovery basket of all something red that Mavi could find in the house.  It got socks, shirt, a feather, LEGO and just about anything.  Of course, I have to include my homemade colour card.  The book was also purchased from Book Depository [aff. link].

So what do we do with our red discovery basket? Well, Vito loves tinkering things and this is what I would give him whenever he needs something to touch and play with.  Every time he takes an object, I would describe it and always mentioning the word “red”.  Like red socks, red feather, red barrel.  Then I would line them up and would say “look Vito they have the same colour… they’re all red”.  I would at times encourage him to say the word “red” as well.

Our shelf also contains the following toys for practicing fine motor skills.

Mavi’s fishing game toy which he got from his birthday.  We never used this until I recently discovered that Vito can use this for 1:1 correspondence.  Later on, we realized that the game itself was fun after all!

This barn puzzle is a miss.  Vito is NOT interested at all. I got this because it was on sale.  I talked about the animals in the puzzle but he doesn’t mind.  What he loves to do here is actually removing the pieces and placing them in the basket.

Again, scribble scribble scribble. This is what he loves as of the moment. I guess he sees his big brother and I write all the time and that’s what he also wanted to do.  He just imitates, which is good!  He’s good holding a pen actually and here he enjoys scribbling on a piece of paper using all three crayons. We finally get to use this Classic Pop Up toy from Galt. It was in the cabinet for almost a year and now he’s more than interested.  He loves pulling out all the tubes, putting them back again, and pressing the little people (the tubes has faces!).  Later on we’ll use this for colour matching :D  He still mouths objects though, so there are instances that he would put the tubes in his mouth.  So parents, be warned! We have this soft rubbery blocks which we used for counting.  I introduced this for stacking but he wasn’t interested.  What he loves to do with these blocks is to mess them, and put them back in the bag.  And I find his choice of activity much better! Early start for tidying up! 

We also use them to count.  We count a lot at home:  counting fingers, toes, kisses, buttons… and this one I showed him how to associated counting with symbols. Yes I know, too early… but he loves the numbers more than the blocks! 

We skipped painting this time and decided to do something different. In our Art basket, we have here materials for our collage activity which is composed of tissue paper (red hues) and a contact paper.

Easy activity.  Vito couldn’t tear up the tissue papers yet (he can tear up the kitchen towel and toilet paper though), so I did it for him.  Then I showed him how to drop or place the pieces into contact paper. He didn’t like the sticky contact paper at all! He loves dropping the paper but would not touch the contact paper.  I encouraged him my placing his hands on it.  This is to take away of his fear and that it’s a safe object for him.

I displayed his art work in our window and he was so fascinated by the contact paper that he keeps on going back to touch it!

  

Oh we have two songs for this series:  Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and When You’re Happy and You Know It.  We sing it in the afternoon, dance with it and create actions which Vito loves to do.  Vito, just like his older brother loves to dance as well and he enjoys doing this activity in the afternoon before Daddy gets home. This is  a good way to practice their gross motor skills!

Oh yeah and we had a beautiful weather last week and we grabbed the opportunity to go out in the yard, explore the grasses and the rocks!  Vito was running around, climbing up the steps, crawling in the grass and playing with our neighbour’s bicycle!

And that’s it!! Watch out for our next post on Toddler Beginnings as I’m going to feature simple activities for St. Patrick’s Day!

A Continent Study of AFRICA for Kids

It’s a month of Africa Continent study in the house.  Mavi enjoyed learning about this beautiful continent, its geography, exploring the different places and landmarks, the wildlife and habitats and of course the different culture and traditions that make Africa unique!

The Study of Ancient Egypt

Here’s a collection of activities for Ancient Egypt Study.  We’ve been using the books The Story of the World Vol 1 and The Usborne Ancient World [aff.link] as our guide and references. This is the first time we’ve ever had an Egypt Study and I was very happy of how Mavi showed so much interest.

 

The Desert.  Learning all about the desert and the environment of Egypt.  We used oatmeal to represent the sand and the figures seen here are from Safari Toobs. 

Mummification.  We tried to apply what we’ve learned of how mummies are made.  Here we prepared a few spices and a tissue wrap to embalm our skeleton model (sorry we did not have any human model LOL). So after wrapping the body, we placed it in sarcophagus (box) and added jewels for the buried King to bring with him in the after life.Familiarization with the Egypt Map and the Nile River.  We used the worksheet from  The Story of the World Vol 1 to recreate the map in a painting.  This will familiarize the child of Egypt’s geography .  See how Mavi made his Nile Delta and the river met in the Mediterranean Sea.

                     

Ancient Egypt Toob.  These are fantastic!  The figures are so detailed and Mavi loved examining each one.  Here, we are learning about each figure (vocabulary) so he’s researching in the internet and the book what each means/represent.  The cards are from Memorizing the Moments.

Pyramids. Mavi recreated the pyramids using his LEGO. That’s supposed to be three pyramids, but Vito played and broke the smallest one.

Papyrus.  We also made this using parchment paper! See how we did it here!

And that’s how we study Ancient Egypt. Next year, when we revisit our World History lessons, we’ll dig a little bit deeper on this subject :)  Hope you like this post. Have fun!

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Toddler Beginnings 04

 

For language, I would read Goodnight Moon to Vito at night. He is starting to identify the book so every morning he would pick this from our shelf and give it to me to read.  The Baby First book, I only added this because we are having the “green” theme and the cover is green LOL.         

 

I love giving Vito these activities and he loves them as well!

Craft sticks sticking on playdough.  He loves the activity, but he loves squeezing the playdough more. 

               

Vito can now snap the Duplo together! Yehey! Such a milestone! His finger muscles must be developing well!  He loves snapping and removing the Duplo parts.

                 

And puzzles and meant to be eaten.  Yes, he still mouths most stuff!  He can grip  the holder properly (and remove the parts) but cannot put the pieces back yet. 

See, he can even grip perfectly the small holder of the puzzle LOL

We love these spools and we use it in our transferring activities.

 

                                

Our music exploration these days are merely listening to nursery rhymes and doing action songs at home. We use anything that  we could find in the kitchen to create music and I guess this would be enough for now. 

I can’t wait for winter to be over so we can explore the outdoors already.  I am not willing to set up a sensory bin as of the moment as it takes a lot of time (and planning) to prepare the bin and would require a great amount of work. 

Hope you like this week’s totschool series!

More toddler activities in my Pinterest board.

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AFRICA in a Nutshell

I love making materials for our geography lessons!  It gives me the freedom to choose subjects, topics to touch, and most of all it gives me the freedom to put depths into it.  Now my latest creation is the Africa Continent Study! It is loaded with activities for you and your little ones or students. (Click the image or this link, Africa in a Nutshell to go to my shop)

So what’s included in this learning material?

The Animal Kingdom

We love using our printables and one of which is our Animal Kingdom cards.  We worked on this last year and hopefully we get to use it again this summer.  You can read about our lesson here.
When your kids are a bit old, it would be nice to introduce them to the much bigger picture.  This will help them understand that a starfish is NOT a fish and that sponges are animals!  Mavi learned a lot from this lesson and help him understand why animals are classified.

The file includes:

• The Animal Kingdom MASTER Chart in A4 SIZE
• Chart with pictures only (no labels) in A4 SIZE
• Chart with labels only in A4 SIZE
• Chart with no pictures and labels in A4 SIZE
• 15 cards with pictures and labels to form the chart
• 15 cards with pictures and no labels (for 3 part card use)
• 15 label cards (for 3 part card use)
• Matching definition cards

Hope you like it!

Ancient Egypt Study: How to Make a Papyrus

Oh this one is an exciting activity for Mavi!  He could not believe that he actually made paper!  Presenting to you how we made Papyrus out of our parchment paper.  This is in line with our Ancient Egypt Study (The Study of Ancient Egypt).

Materials needed:

• Glue mixture. (mix 1 cup of flour with 2 cups of water)
• strips of parchment paper.  You can use anything you like here, but I decided to use parchment paper to make it more realistic
• Aluminium foil
• kitchen towel
• rolling pin

This was our setup. I covered the area where we’re going to work so it won’t stick in the wooden table.

Geological Time Scale with Safari Toobs

Last year, I was able to purchase the Cambrian and Prehistoric Life Toobs from Amazon because it was on sale.  I’ve always wanted to have them so we can use the figures in our Geological Time lesson. Remember the first time Mavi and I had the lesson at home? It was a hit! He love it so much! His interest came to light when he started reading the Universe Trilogy:

Born with a Bang

Lava to Life

Mammals who Morph

After which he started to do his own “timeline” by connecting the dots in the stories (based on the books).  Because we didn’t have the appropriate figures, our representation of the timeline is incomplete.  And finally, these toobs were on sale and we just have to finish what we started!

So here are the additional toobs that we used (aside from the dinosaur toobs)":

The Cambrian Toob. Loooove them! They are so colourful and the details! OMG!

The Prehistoric Life Miniatures.  Love this well!  Too bad it doesn’t have enough animal figures on it though. But we love it anyway.

So here are my boys, Mavi putting things in action.  I made the paper mat. I simply added the label on the side.

And Vito, taking away the items from the mat and destroying everything that Mavi has created LOL.

Ahhh… here it is! I finally got the chance to snap a photo of Mavi’s work while the little one is napping.

Pictures below how Mavi would research each of the figures.  Yes I’m beginning to teach him to do research using the web.  He’s getting there, he loves reading out loud his discoveries (soon I’ll teach him how to take down notes!).  I told him we can do research in books and in the internet nowadays.  I also made labels for each figures.  They are actually etched on each but it so difficult to read. 

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More of Science-related activities here!

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FREE Ikea Puppets Matching Cards

As mentioned in my Instagram, Vito (and Mavi!) enjoyed playing these cute puppets from Ikea.  Because Vito is starting to appreciate pictures, and learning to identify them, I made each puppet a matching card so we can play a matching game in the next few days.

Anyone interested to download a copy of the cards, feel free to click the image above for the link. Or click here.
Enjoy!

Introducing Periodic Table To Kids

This is Chemistry 101, and a lot of people have asked me if it is possible to teach kids all about the basics of elements to kids.  I didn’t believe that until I came across this kid-friendly Periodic Table via social media.