Tot School Wrap-Up Week 1

Mavi is 29 months old.

I have to admit that I’m not prepared for our activities this week.  As you all know, we just came from our month long vacation and I’m still a little bit tired.  But since my son will be looking for some things to do this week, I gave him the usual activities that we did last year.

 

CRAFTS

    

We made the uppercase and lowercase crafts as he kept asking for “more letters”.

Then we read this book entitled “Fruit” which was given to me by a friend back in Belgrade.  It became a favorite of Mavi instantly.  He loves how we can flap the pages revealing the stages of apple tree and the different parts of an apple.

MATH

For our Math:

• Counting apples using small pompoms balls
• Sorting colors: popsicle sticks
• Ordering numbers
• one-to-one correspondence

I also tried to teach him how to make number symbols using his fingers.

LANGUAGE

We read lots of books this week, ranging from apple stories to Dinosaurs to Dr. Seuss.

Then he found his Melissa and Doug’s wooden letters and he started to match the uppercase letters with its lowercase letters all by himself! I am so proud for he has mastered his alphabets already, being able to identify the big and small letters. 

 

We did a few do-a-dot activities with letter A.  He absolutely love dotting in the circles of the letter A and in the alligator/apple picture. Although Mavi can easily unscrew the marker’s caps, he still can’t work out how to screw it back again.

By the way, I got these letters printables from Homeschool Creations and Confessions of a Homeschooler.

And early this year, I found this at Popular Bookstore and I just have to get it right away because I wanted to jumpstart Mavi with his writing skills.  So for the past few days we’ve been practicing writing by working on this lowercase letters.   He enjoys doing this activity!

 

MONTESSORI ACTIVITIES

• Paint
• Scooping using his ABC Lacing Sweets which I got from Learning Store SG

• Putting stickers on the outline of shapes.  I just draw the shapes by myself and handed Mavi a bunch of label star stickers for him to use.  At first he was eager working with sticking and making sure that he properly sticks the star on the outline.  Later on, I guess he got tired and doesn’t want to finish each shape so he kept moving on to the next.  I later on showed him the second set of shapes but doesn’t want to work on them either.  This activity was a hit, though it’s not that something can they can work for a long time.

• Putting back the markers into their boxes.  This comes as a surprise as I just instructed him to return the markers back in the cabinet.  He insisted that he should put it back on its box.

 

• The idea of this activity was supposedly to balance the buttons on the popsicle sticks.  But he wasn’t interested.  So it ended up as a button shape activity wherein I formed shapes using the buttons.  He totally loved it!! He’s so happy everytime I formed a shape!   He kept asking that we do more.. but I ran out of buttons.  The next day he asked that we should do it again.

 

SCIENCE

We did our very first science lesson here.

Life Cycle of an Apple

This is the first time time I attempted to give Mavi a 3-part card, so everything is on the process of experimentation.  Since I don’t have a proper training on Montessori, I just rely on what I read on the net and on some Mommy blogs on how they use this type of card (Montessori-sh).

So here goes....

This week we’re working on “letter A is for apple theme” and I was inspired to show him how an apple seeds becomes a fruit.  I was given a book by a friend which is all about fruits... and coincidentally, it showed the life cycle of an apple.  Maverick was into it for a long time... and he asked me to read the book over and over again. 

     

I prepared my cards early on.  Got the printables from Montessori for Everyone (free), printed it and put it in a cardboard.  Then I showed him the part of the book where it presented how the apples came to be... from seed to a fruit.  As I show the picture on the book, I also present to him each card (first part - picture with label), describing the stages of the apple’s life.

He was very very interested. All the time I was discussing, he paid attention.  After I have shown him the cards, I took the second part/set of the cards (without the label) and asked him what the picture on the card was.  He got 4 correct answers out of 6.  He got confused between the seed and seedling; and the bud and flower since they have similar pictures.  Then I asked him to match the picture card to the ones with the labels which he worked breezily.

Supposedly, I have to show him the third-part of the card which was the labels, and then asked him to match it to the pictures.  But I have this feeling that it might be too early for him to match or recognize words since he can’t read yet.  So what I did was that I showed him each labels, describe the word and then match it to the pictures.  This way he will have an idea on what to do with it during our future activities.

So far, this was a hit and it made me think that I should continue to feed him new ideas and things to learn each week.  He may not have digested everything I taught him, but at least he knows now what a “bud” means :-).

New activities for Math

Since last year I’ve been gathering a few stuff from Spotlight and Daiko for our tot school and I am happy to announce that I have discovered a few stuff that we can use for our homeschooling.

Hence, here are some of the “new” activities that we did for Math this week, using “my finds” on the said stores.

Counting apples (using craft pompoms)

I would show him a number and let him put the right number of red-pompoms on the tree.

Sorting colored popsicle sticks

 He enjoyed this one so well! Popsicle sticks were something new to him and liked how colorful it were.

The color/number wheel with matching wooden pins

Saw these pins at Daiko, and at first I didn’t want to get them because they were so small.  But the ones at Spotlight were too pricey so I got them instead.  I haven’t introduced this one to Mavi though, but I am hoping that he will like this as well.   The advantage of these small wooden pins is that they are very easy to manipulate.  We will be using these to match the number of dots or colors on the wheel.

I hope to come up with other ideas for Math... I will try to create original activities, but since I am not a professional teacher, it’s difficult for me to think of creative ideas for teaching mathematics. So what I do is that I resourced most of the activities that we have on the homeschooling blogs.

Letter Craft: a is for apple

Source:  Totally Tots ~ lowercase letters

 

 

Recently we made the lowercase letter A in line with our theme “apple” this week.

I forgot to add the apple seeds in the craft.

Letter Craft: A is for Alligator

Source:  Totally Tots ~ uppercase letters

 

 

We did this craft early January when wanted to do some “tot school” activities.  Got this from Totally Tots website.  They put up this wonderful letter craft ideas for Mom’s to use for this kids.  Just click on the link above so you will be directed to the site where the step by step instructions are provided.

In our case, after making the letter A outline, I made Mavi color the letter using his Do-a-Dot markers and Crayola’s Pip Squeaks.  Much to my surprise, he enjoyed using both!  Sometimes, he switch the use of each markers such as he would make dots using the pip squeaks and draw lines using the do-a-dot markers.

Then the glue-activity comes in.  I have to say that when it comes to gluing, I don’t have to teach him and guide him that much as he expertly knows how to do it already.  There are times that I just have to tell him where to add more glue or that if he puts too much glue on a certain area.

He effortlessly place the googly eyes on the letter A.  I was happy that he can control his fingers holding tiny objects so well and perfectly placing those cute googly eyes on a small area.

I hope you get to enjoy this craft as much as we did!

Prijatno!

Back to regular programming

We’re finally back from our vacation and expect a tot school post this week!

But.. there’ll be major changes for this year’s homeschooling.  One of which is that Mavi will go to school because I now have some work to do, the good news about this is that, I will be working at home and his school is just right across our place.

So for this year, most of our activities would be probably be in the afternoon, or on weekends.

We will be starting with with apples/plants in the next few days, so stay tuned for updates!

We're back in Lagoon

This time I brought Mavi and Yanyan with me and we fed the Tilapias!  They had a blast!

A Holiday in Switzerland! (Part Deux)

On our last day in Zurich, we simply walked around Glattfelden.  The place was just purely magic! I was so happy that we made this walk because it's one of those relaxing activity that hubby and I haven't done for quite some time.   And since Mavi was with us, it was also the best time to show him everything that there is to see in Zurich: the clear streams, the farm animals, the ducks floating and swimming around, the forest and wonderful green frozen fields.