Beginning Reading: Language Objects and Activities

Language activities are a favourite in the house now as Vito’s interest in reading has peaked.  We are using language objects more often to practise letter sounds through games (aside from sandpaper letters).  These language objects that we have were collected through the years, starting from Mavi’s time and it has been very useful now in Vito’s journey on beginning reading.

What are Insects?

Here’s a simple way of telling whether an animal is an insect:  has 6 legs (with or without wings).  This is something new to Vito, the word “insect”.  He usually calls them with their real names like flies, bees, dragonflies, etc. but is not familiar with their category.  Now, this is the first time that I introduced this concept, so he struggled a little bit until we started counting the legs!

Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of Insects

Vito and I have been talking about insects in the past few days.  I mentioned in my previous post, the current interest on insects was brought about by their sudden appearance.  So far he has encountered quite a few already like garden ants, flies, wasps and bees, and bugs. It’s a shame we haven’t seen grasshoppers and dragonflies here, I used to catch and collect them as a child (back in Asia). Anyway, since our last activity on Farm Families, Vito still loves to learn about mommies, daddies, and babies, thus I introduced the life cycle of insects early on in our activities.  Unlike my past activities with Mavi, this one is very simple and straight forward.

Seen here are the life cycles figures of:  butterfly, bee, ant, and ladybird.

Montessori Inspired Butterfly Coloring Matching Activity

Saw this idea from one of my favourite Instagram account Momducator.  It’s a brilliant idea of using Montessori color tablets (set 3) to match with the butterfly colors of Safari Toobs (Insects, Butterflies, Bulk Bag).  This is a great practise for visual perception, picking the right color combination to match with the butterflies.

Plants versus Animals Sorting Activity

I am so thankful for The Helpful Garden for providing us this printable (saved me a lot of time!).  Of all the plant and animal activities that we have done in the past, I have forgotten this one basic activity for Montessori botany and zoology: identifying plant and animals. 

Indoor Garden Play for Counting Bugs

Vito is 42 months old.

So we are seeing a lot of bugs lately.  Vito is enjoying it!  We do nature walks in the morning to see the honeybees, flies and unidentified flying objects in the field. And we even caught the wasp that went inside the house last week for exploration.  Lately, we would walk our way to Mavi’s school to pick him up.  During these walks, we would count the number of bugs we see in the bushes and trees.  Vito enjoyed it and I thought that we could also do it at home as an extension.  So I made this “garden” setup for him, wherein we will pretend to catch bugs with our tweezers and place the right number in our number cards. 

Food Preparations That A 3 Year Old Can Do

I don’t often share the practical life activities (in the kitchen) of the kids because I seldom take photos of them while working.  Mostly, because they handle some delicate materials and I wanted to give my full attention whenever we work in the kitchen.  Now that Vito is quite adept in this area, I started taking pictures to demonstrate some of the things that he can work on independently.  These are mostly breakfast and snacks preparations.  And because our main meal involves boiling oil or water and meat, only the big brother can participate on this not Vito (3 years old).

Montessori Inspired Study of Snails for Preschoolers

We’ve been getting a lot of morning showers which resulted in a bunch of snails popping up everywhere.  Vito is loving it, now that he’s older, he’s enjoying the sight of these little fellows.  One time, we caught one sticking out my husband’s car.  Vito was excited!  I made Vito watch as I removed the snail from the car, placed it in our disposable plastic container and brought it inside for him to observe (and explore). 

Learning About Farm Families

I shared in my Instagram last week that Vito is obsessed with the concept of “mommy, baby, and daddy” thing.  He would always pair our animal figures into families and do play pretend.  This made me decided to introduce Vito to the farm animal families which I introduced to Mavi a long time ago (Farm Families - FREE Sorting Cards).  There’s a deeper explanation why we teach kids about animal families.  We teach kids to distinguish and describe objects to form them into bigger groups.   Commonly, we group inanimate objects according to their size, shape and color which is an easy task for the child.  But when it comes to real organisms with no definite shape, size and color, it is more difficult to recognize similar characteristics. 

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Gonge River Stones And Why We Love Them

Oh I can’t tell you how much we love these Gonge Riverstones!  I was really skeptic of these at first.  I mean, why purchase a plastic makeshift rocks when you have the entire backyard as a playground.  We don’t really need it.  Then as the boys were spending a lot of time in the yard these days, I realized that we don’t really have those flat rocks the boys can hop around with or use for play pretend.  I was thinking that if we can have those, the boys and I can play games involving gross motor and some relays.  So I decided to try the Gonge Riverstones.  They were on sale, and I picked them over the Gonge Hilltops because we already have three large rocks at the backyard which are way better than the plastic ones.  Anyway, I tell you, the moment these Gonge Riverstones arrived, it’s been non-stop play for the boys!  We liked them right away, and so does my husband!  This is my honest review of the river stones, and I bought this for our personal use and was not paid to do a review. 

Here are some reasons why we love it and totally recommend!

Montessori Inspired Farm Activities for Preschoolers

It’s going to be an exciting month for Vito as we are learning about the farm and farm animals!  Kids are so fascinated with the farm, probably because of the domestic animals that can easily be identified and the fact that the farm is where we mostly get our food.  Early in life, the kids are educated that the milk comes from the cow, eggs from chicken, wool from sheep and etc.  At first, we visited a few farm animals in the zoo weeks ago.  We pet some goats, chicken, and seen some donkeys and cattle for Vito to experience.  We’ll be visiting a real farm this month too, and hopefully we’ll get to see some real farming work!

Now, for extension work, here are some activities I prepared for Vito at home to learn more about the farm.  We’re starting some of these already and you can see the photos in my Instagram account.  Please follow me there for real time activities!

BOOK REVIEW: Farmer Falgu Goes to the Market

We can’t get enough of Farmer Falgu!  Here’s another book that we totally love, Famer Falgu Goes to the Market.  It’s market day and Farmer Falgu has to transport his goods to the market.  Though it seemed like an easy task, but strange things happened on his way to the market which sabotages his vegetables and eggs!

Magnatiles for Creativity

We love Magnatiles!  If you’re following my Instagram, we used this often times at home during free play.  I hesitated for the longest time before I purchased these amazing magnetic tiles because of the price, but oh boy, they are so worth-it!  Aside from the fact that it has some educational value, it is also an open ended toy which the boys love to use for building castles, houses, forts, cars and just about it anything!  The possibility is endless thus we love it!

Introducing Kids to Construction Tools

If you are like us, who has no means of doing some carpentry work, then this post is for you!  For one thing, my father and his entire family are carpenters.  They make furnitures, build houses and buildings in my home city and I remember spending most of my time during summer vacation in construction sites managed by my grandfather.  This is the reason why at a young age, I know how to use most carpentry materials despite my mom’s warnings.  Sadly those skills weren’t passed to the new generations.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t expose our kids to this simple carpentry work like hammering, using nuts and bolts, drilling and the like.  And of course, with the advent of IKEA, we need to somehow teach them all about DIYs and these basic tools. 

In this post, I’m sharing our learning toys and materials in exposing my 3 years old to some of these construction tools to acquire those basic skills .

FREE Number Symbols for Counting and Number Recognition

Vito is in a sensitive period of numbers and counting. With this, I made him these number symbol cards inspired by my previous activities with Mavi.  Obviously, I couldn’t find our old printables, so I made a new set and I decided to share it with you as FREE DOWNLOAD!

BOOK REVIEW: Farmer Falgu Goes on a Trip

I was so excited to receive Farmer Falgu Goes on a Trip for the kids!  It’s our first time to own a multicultural fiction book and knowing my kids who are very interested about different cultures, they will surely enjoy this! Oh boy, and they did! Most especially my preschooler who was very attentive when I was reading this to him. 

Montessori Math Counting Beyond Ten: The Teens

Vito loves counting.  He may not know yet how to count from 1 to 100 but he knows how to integrate math and numbers in daily life.  He mastered his 1:1 correspondence early on and now he’s learning how to count beyond ten.  I was surprised the first time I heard him counting from 11 and up.  I didn’t introduced that to him yet but he already knows.  It’s like self taught, but I was thinking that he might have learned it from his brother.  And because he might be in a sensitive period on number now, I decided to give him a few exercises to recognize and name numbers from 11 to 20, and understanding what those numbers represent in quantity.

FREE Letter B Dot and Tracing Activity Sheets

I’m so happy of how my dot activity sheets for Vito turned out!  I prepared this for our Bird Unit (for the letter b sound) and has been a morning ritual for Vito to complete covering the dots with our glass nuggets.

Montessori Inspired Bird Unit Activities for Preschoolers

The inspiration behind this unit activity is because we’ve been seeing a lot of birds now and that Vito loves chicken. In my IG account, I shared how much he adored the chickens in the park and can’t stop talking about them.  So I've put up these activity trays for him to work on while he’s still interested in birds.  We started with some of these already and so far he’s having fun!

Introducing the Life Cycle of a Chicken to Preschoolers

We are learning about birds this month, and the first activity that we did was to look into the life of a chicken.  The chicken, especially the hen is a popular subject for bird study because it’s convenient and always available for nature-study.  Take for example in our case, Vito got really interested into chickens during our visit to the park weeks ago.  He just can’t stop talking about his experience with the chickens in the park, so I decided to borrow some books in the library about chickens so we can talk about this bird more.

Beginning Letter Phonics Cards

Hello everyone! I wanted to share with you Vito’s current favourite printable, our Beginning Letter Phonics Cards.  You might have seen these in some of my letter-themed post.  These are card strips which contain letters and their corresponding objects (real images matching the  beginning letter sound).  The product comes in two sets: control cards and the activity cards.  Below is a glimpse of how we use the materials, which Vito would work on every day (sensitive period for letters)!

FREE Land Water and Air Sorting Mats

Many of my blog followers are requesting for these sorting mats and I’m so happy to finally get to share them with you!!  You can now download a copy of our land, water and air sorting mats which Vito and I would use in sorting different animal figures (Safari Toobs and Schleich) whether they thrive in land, water or in the sky.  See how we used the sorting mats in this post, Introducing Toddlers to Animals in Land, Water and Air.

Introducing the Solar System to Preschoolers

In line with our Days of Creation activities, the boys and I talked about how the universe came to be.  Mavi used his Usborne Fact Cards once again to review some solar system concepts and this made Vito get into the mood of exploring the planets as well.  

Ancient Egypt Learning Materials for Kids

This holy week, Mavi revisited ancient Egypt after rereading the Ten Commandments story.  We dug up our Egypt Picture Book materials so he could work on some readings and do some activities to follow them.  In this post, I will share the contents of our Egypt Picture Book learning pack, which you might want to try.  It contains reading materials, activity pages, picture cards and outline cards for colouring.

Days of the Creation for Preschoolers

In our home, we would read Bible stories and relived some beautiful stories during the Lenten season.  We are approaching it in a spiritual manner (for faith formation) rather than doing lots of egg activities.  Mavi and I have been talking about the Exodus the other day, while Vito and I did the Days of Creation.  This post shares our little project in learning about the great story of God’s creation of the world.   I’m also sharing our kid-friendly Bible which we are using at home.

Montessori Inspired Layers of the Ocean for Preschoolers

Vito is 40 months old.

Moving on to learning about the ocean for Earth Day, I’ve set up this activity tray to demonstrate to the boys that the ocean has many layers and that it is mostly represented by the darkness and lightness of the color blue. In the set-up, the layers are represented by the bottles, from the layer where there is sunlight to the part where there’s none at all.  We are using the book About the Ocean by Cathryn Sill to help us explore the different animals in the ocean.  Since this activity is intended for Vito (but Mavi was also participating), I didn’t focus much on the names of each layer since he can’t read yet, our activity was more on introducing the concept and for familiarity.

Guide to Math Homeschool Materials for Preschoolers

I’m often asked about the math homeschool materials we used at home (for preschoolers), so I made this list and hope it will serve as your guide in finding the right educational materials for your homeschool or classroom adventure.  I believe that we need to expose our kids to math early on by giving them the appropriate learning materials to explore and discover.  These materials will introduce your child to nine major math concepts:  numbers and quantity, shapes and patterns, picture graphs, length, time, money, fractions, mass and volume.

Montessori Sensorial Activities: Stereognostic Mystery Bag

I finally introduced the Montessori Stereognostic Bag to Vito.  The Montessori Stereognostic Bag is often composed of 10 matching pairs of wooden shapes that is drawn in a bag to feel and match.  This activity develops the stereognostic sense of the child, using touch to create a mental image of the object.  Stereognostic sense is defined as the ability to perceive and recognize the form of objects in the absence of visual and auditory information.  Other version of this is called  “the mystery bag”, wherein most homeschool moms customized the content of their bags by putting nature objects or just about anything from around the house. 

Montessori Sensorial The Brown Stairs

So I gave in to my desire and bought Vito the brown stairs, and boy oh boy, I didn’t regret it!  Similar to the way he responded to the pink tower, Vito loves and enjoy using our Montessori brown stairs!  I realized that there’s so much more we can do when he used both of the materials, the extension activities are limitless and pattern making is even more challenging!

Old Tracks New Tricks for Train Enthusiasts

Oh the boys and I love to play trains! And in fact, I love creating train tracks with them too.  The only problem these days is that, our train sets were long forgotten due to Bruder trucks which they recently received last Christmas. But boy, oh boy, that changed when Old Tracks New Tricks arrived in the mail one day, and my 3 years old upon seeing the book immediately requested to play with his Thomas Train!

 

Montessori Inspired April Activities for Preschoolers

I am so excited to share our April activities!    We will be revisiting some activities we did in the past, and there are new ones too!  I only prepared a few activities for April because (1) we still have to work on Earth Science activity trays (2) it’s Mavi’s Easter vacation so Vito would probably prefer to play with his brother than “home” school with Mommy and lastly (3) weather permits, we’ll be spending most of our days outdoors or do some field trips here or there.  Anyway, just to be sure that I have something for Vito to work on in case we needed to stay home, here are some preschool activities for him!

B4FIAR: Caps for Sale! (with FREE Counting Cards)

Have you read the book Caps for Sale?  It’s one of our all time favourite classic books in the house!  I first heard of it when we were in Singapore, borrowed it from the library and Mavi immediately loved it.  Because I love the idea of Five in a Row, I decided to purchase the book so that we can do extension activities over and over again with the book.  Now that it’s Vito’s turn, I decided to prepare simple activities to go along with book that are centered around the three objects found in the book:  caps, money and monkeys.

Animal Habitats Sorting and Activity Sheets

Vito is 40 months old.

If you read my post on the 12 Months More of Montessori for Earth Science, Vito and I will be working on animal habitats.  We tried this before, in its simplest form when Vito was still a toddler and I decided to move forward into a more abstract approach (with some sensorial activity) now that Vito is older.  In this post, I’m going to share the learning materials which the boys are using and the books to go along with our activities.

Teaching Land and Water Forms to Preschoolers Through Play

Vito is 40 months old.

In line with our Earth Science activities, I decided to introduce Vito to land and water forms using the Montessori Sandpaper Land & Water Form Cards and the Safari Toob vehicles (Safari Ltd On the Road TOOB, Safari Ltd In The Sky TOOB, Safari Ltd In The Water TOOB).  I came up with this idea because a few weeks ago, Vito was really hooked with our land, water, and air transportation figures from Safari Toobs.

Montessori Inspired Phonics Mystery Bag Game

Vito is 40 months old.

I’m always in search of new learning games and activities to try with Vito.  Vito is quite a challenge.  He’s a little bit picky with activities, he always wants it to be interesting, some sort of a game.  He is currently in a sensitive period with letters, always singing the song, identifying letters in books, pretending to read words, completing his alphabet puzzles and more.  He knows the letter sounds and can identify uppercase and lowercase, so I’m moving forward to phonics and CVC reading practise in our language activities at home.  To start with, we are practising how to identify beginning letter sounds of “objects” in picture format.  I know, I should be doing objects, but Vito is always distracted with objects.  He sees them as toys, not as language learning materials. We don’t get things done whenever I use objects because we end up playing.  So I’m sticking with picture cards for now, it’s working on his part.  Whenever he sees a picture card, he would name it and emphasize the beginning letter sound.  This was our first try, and we’ve been doing this activity occasionally.  Lately, I acquired an extra tiny bag from my Stereognostic material and I made use of it in this game.  We often use moveable alphabet but Vito insisted to use the Hape Uppercase Puzzle (he loves this puzzle!).

Montessori Inspired Activities for Earth Science

I am so excited to share our activity trays for Earth Day! This is in line with our 12 Months More of Montessori Series wherein we are focusing on Earth Science.  In this post, I gathered a few topics related to Earth Science, assembled them into tray activities that’s suitable for preschoolers from ages 3 years and older.  Hope you enjoy our activities for the coming weeks!

Flags of the World

Earlier this year I bought Mavi this Montessori Map and Flags because they’ve been having a lot of geography lessons in school and he wanted to master his knowledge of flags.  As it turned out, this has been one of the most used Montessori material at home as of the moment.  There are 32 country flags with a stand.  Mavi can mostly identify those of European and American countries, but he needs to review his African and middle eastern countries.

The Montessori Number Rods

I love Montessori math materials.  They are so engaging and well thought of that  the child can easily absorb concepts and retain what is learned.  Take for example this Number Rods which I recently  introduced to Vito.  We are mostly using counters in our math activities, it’s more abstract and quantitative.  With Number Rods, counting here is more linear and sequential. My goal was for Vito to learn:

• how to sequence  ‘one’ to ‘ten’ (they form a staircase)
• to understand the value of each number

B4FIAR: Harold and the Purple Crayon

I love book extension activities.  This is one of the reasons why I enjoy doing Before Five In a Row with the boys.  So when I introduced the book Harold and the Purple Crayon, I knew that its a story that we can explore beyond than just reading.  The book itself is enjoyable to read, engaging and the boys found it funny.  Vito was glued to it for a long time.  At times, he would even “pretend” to read it by himself, mimicking how I read it to him at night. 

If you love this book, or if you plan to get one (highly recommended!) I listed below the areas of learning we touched by just  doing this simple easy to set-up activities:

Montessori Inspired Land, Air and Water Transportation Cards

Vito is 39 months old.

My kids are obsessed with vehicles, but I think most boys are!  They love their Bruder trucks and figures from Safari Toobs which they use a lot in pretend play and play-based learning.  When Mavi borrowed this amazing book from the library (DK Visual Encyclopedia of Vehicles) Vito can’t stop identifying the vehicles in the book.  It’s either he would ask us around (what’s this?), or identify the toys he own and match it to the pictures.  It’s pretty amazing how much interest he has shown!  To widen his vocabulary and knowledge of vehicles, I created cards for him so we can start with the Montessori three lesson period and later on, do some sorting.

Montessori Inspired March Activities for Preschoolers

With Vito’s current obsession with letters, I’m focusing on letter recognition, phonics and writing from hereon.  Our homeschool activities in March are mostly revisiting past activities and doing a lot of extensions. Check the details below to know more about it:

Animals Around the World Activity

Vito is 39 months old.

There is nothing more precious in this world than seeing your kids work together peacefully LOL.  During the midterm break, I prepared some activities which both of them can participate in.  It’s not just about the academics, but my main purpose is for them to learn how to work together as a team and bond as brothers.  So aside from learning about flowers, the boys also explored the animals of the world using our Montessori Inspired Animal Continents Activity Sheets.  Mavi was so ecstatic to do this with Vito as he loves animals (he said he’s an expert) and geography.

Montessori Inspired Parts of a Flower Activities

For Mavi's midterm break, I am planning activities that both my 3-year-old and 8-year-old boys can participate in. One of the activities is to learn about flowers and their composition. Despite having done this activity before at the ages of 4 and 6, Mavi is still excited to do it again with his younger brother. This is a new challenge for me as I need to ensure that the activity is engaging for my younger son, while also conveying information to my older son. In the post, you can find out how I made the boys work together in the activities that I prepared for them.

My Blog Directory!

Hello everyone!! I’m so happy to let you know that I now have a blog directory!  This is a visual organization of all my posts (archives) categorized by age and topics.  You can easily access this by clicking the image on the upper right corner of my blog with this icon:

Montessori Inspired Trays for St. Patrick’s Day

Are you observing St. Patrick’s Day? We do! It’s usually one of the most colorful time in Ireland, where everyone is just so happy and festive.  Anyway, with all the green and rainbow decors around, I’m preparing Montessori working trays for Vito as we approach the celebration of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.  Mavi will be doing a lot of work for St. Patrick’s in his school so I spared him from this.  My aim here is to introduce Vito to the symbols of the celebration and he’ll be exploring these in our activities.

We Love MiniLUK

I remember playing this when I was 10 years old at my friend’s house.  It was addictive! The more I finished an exercise, the more I wanted to go on and on with the booklets.

Hands-On Learning on Common Flowers

Valentine's Day season is always the time wherein the boys and I would talk about flowers.  Not just because it is Valentine's Day, but because this is basically the time wherein we get to see spring flowers starting to bloom out from their buds.  We see them everywhere, in the backyard and front lawn, parks and of course in our neighbours’ houses.  My knowledge of flowers is very limited; I only knew of some tropical flowers from my country and Asian countries.  Of course, there’s always the rose, tulip and orchids… but no, I haven’t heard of daffodils, crocus and poppies not until I stepped foot in Europe.