Tot School Wrap Up Week 10

May 1 to 8, 2011

Mavi is  32 months old.

Here’s what we did during this week.

ARTS

Lots of painting.. including body painting!

He started to paint his animals.

 

Then considered painting his hands.

 

Until he discovered how cool it would be to paint his arms too!

 

He also got interested with his do-a-dot markers again, and started to scribble using my Gtech Pilot pens.

 

MATH

Found his Hundred Boards puzzle in the drawer and remove it so he can play with it again.  Still all he can do is from numbers 1 to 20 and he loses interest in finishing the rest of the puzzle.

 

Still loving counting using his do-a-dot markers.

Our first attempt to play graphing game using ice cream flavors.  But he couldn’t grasp the idea.  He just loves tossing the dice and counting the number of dots.

He loves my ice cream cut-outs thought.  He kept on stacking them on one ice cream cone.  But I why he couldn’t understand why the pink is strawberry ice cream, the brown is for chocolate and white is for vanilla.... that’s because have never eaten a “real” ice cream with those flavors.  All he tried was those on popsicle sticks.

He wants his car to eat the ice cream.

 

LANGUAGE

We did a lot of things for language this week!  I think we reviewed the rest of the red series this week.

The picture below is Mavi reading his letter F Itsy Bitsy book  and builing the letter M using foam sheets. 

He traced his letters M, F, B and I. 

Traced small letters of the red series using this, and read our sound books.

Traced our sandpaper letters as well and form the letters using our playdough.

     

PRACTICAL LIFE

Dropper.  He did his best to do this but still a lot of miss! He still couldn’t get the water from the cup using his dropper.  Now I’m lost and doesn’t know how to teach him how to use it.

 

SCIENCE

We did botany this week, studied the parts of the leaf.

Tot School Wrap Up Week 8

April 11 to April 17, 2011

Mavi 31 months old

Books were read this week.  

 

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This week has been fruitful because we did a number of new activities to brought back Mavi’s interest in homeschool.  As you all know the past few weeks he was more interested in free play and doing things “his way” and doesn’t want to be instructed.  I also mentioned that since I brought him new toys, such as the wooden blocks and animal miniatures... all he would do is just play with them.

In effect Mavi seem to have lost his interest in art ... so I still try to incorporate art to our activities.  For this week I made him paint letter cardboards which I got from a craft store.  He ended up painting his hands.

Enjoyed playing pretend using do-a-dot markers.  I drew the background, telling him that it’s an ocean with a big big sun.  He was the one who added the boat, log and the shark.

 

He also started his 100 boards.  He love doing this.  He can only finish up to number 20 (2 rows). Funny thing is that my number chips would pop out because of inconsistence in sizes, too thin and not sturdy.  So the chips keep moving and popping out here and there once he placed them on the control board.  This irritated him as he wanted to perfectly align every chip.  So he was more busy correcting the line-up of the chips than placing the number chips to their respective controls. I hope that I can  get an actual 100 boards in the future.

Introduced skip counting using golden beads (tens).  We counted one strand of 10 beads and I told him that it is call “one tens”, then to make 20, I told him that we should add two tens.. and so on and so forth.  He participated but didn’t show much interest.

He still continued playing his farm animals.

 

Incorporating language lesson with animals and objects:  Moveable Letters and CVC Pink Series.  Will tell you more about my pink series soon.

I also showed him our object box for ramf.  Oh this was his favorite toy for days!! At first he participated with sorting objects according to their beginning letter sounds. At times I also use this to create stories.  But later on he just wanted to play with them in a free play manner.  I will try to prepare a separate post for this.

Play pretend includes cooking and doing groceries.

 

Practical skills includes foam stickers: peeling off the skin and sticking it anywhere and body part trace.  He loves to trace his hands, feet and body... then he would also trace my hands once his hands were covered with markers :-)

 

Cardboard Insets

A few weeks ago, I made Mavi this insets.  They’re made of cardboards and the instead of brads I used pipe cleaners.  I was lucky enough that the store where I get my supplies have pink and blue colored boards, enough to look like Montessori-ish.

Since we can’t use our crayons for this activity I got him colored pencils as well. 

I got out one set and showed him how to  use it in drawing and making shapes.  He tried a few lines then got bored.  He was rather more interested in removing the inner insets and placing it back again... making sure that it fits right in.

Preoccupied with Play Pretend

These days my son has a “tot school regression”.  All he wants to do once he arrives from home is play with his blocks and miniature animals.  It started when I bought him a set of shopping cart and play groceries.

He enjoyed this for a moment, his interest didn’t last that long. 

Then I got him a blocks to play and it was a sure win!  Here he is enjoying his Imaginarium blocks together with his zoo animals.

At first he doesn’t know what to do with it, so I showed him how to play the wooden blocks.  To make sense out of it, I made our animals a zoo.  Added some trees and tada! he can’t stop playing!

Another version of animals not... in the jungle.

Then I got him Safari Farm Toobs.  He enjoyed his collections all the more.  These toobs are amazing! I love every single bit of them... and I plan to hoard hehe.  It doesn’t come cheap though, but the quality is good.  It feels like a hard rubber rather than plastic, and the most important is these toobs are lead free.  Because he loves animals, our theme for this week (Week 8) is all about farm animals.  Will post about our detailed activities soon.

    

These are miniature erasers.  I got them from a random store and I wanted to use them for our object box and pink series.  Apparently, he discovered where I kept them for future use so I took it all out and he started playing with them.

Lastly,  here’s what he did for our water play.  Bought the boats for PHP100.

So these are the things my son is enjoying right now.  And like I said, I am regressing from formal tot school to allow him explore things on his own.

Tot School Wrap-Up Week 4

Mavi is 30 months old.
March 14 – 20, 2011.

Since my son is in school we didn’t do that much homeschooling this week. 

CRAFTS

We’ve been skipping crafts project and instead do a lot of painting this week. We still continue using oil pastel for artwork.  This week I sketched him a cow and he painted over it using a watercolor.

MATH

I’ve been missing our shape projects so I gave him this activity again.  He covered the “flat” shapes using buttons (with his Daddy).  He love this activity.

Another shape-related activity was forming objects out of shapes.  I cut out different shapes from a cardstock, and used a contact paper for sticking shapes together.  It was Mavi’s idea actually.  The original activity was just to stick the shapes together on the contact paper. 

But he took out his Mouse Shapes book and started doing what the mouse did in the story.

And we count 1 to 54 using dot markers.

LANGUAGE

We read books and did plenty of story telling.

He traced letters and practiced erasing.

 

He put some stickers after we color our alphabets.

 

PRACTICAL LIFE

He practice scooping this week.

And more scooping...

   

And later on folding a paper. Sorry for the blurred picture hehe.

SCIENCE

We sort animals according to which they belong... on a zoo, farm or ocean.  Then used a few of my miniature animal farms and Mavi matched them to the pictures.  Too bad I only had a few.  It would have been best if I have the complete collection.

Hope you enjoy this week’s post! Till next time :-)