Tot School Wrap-Up Week 6

Mavi is 31 months old

March 28 to April 3, 2011

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I’m having a hard time catching up with all the post that I needed to share.  Work has taken most of my time and blogging seems to be my last priority.  So please do pardon me if I make this post as quick as possible and just bombard you with pictures.

This week theme is all about chicken and birds. 

CRAFTS 

 

Dinosaur craft is here.

Lowercase letter “r” craft.  We don’t do this activity anymore wince Mavi seems so preoccupied with this animals.

Bird/chick craft.  This is the first time Mavi encountered a feather.  He was scared of it at first... but got used to it later.  I told him that the feather is light and soft and tickles him.  Good means of sensorial activity.

MATH

 

Counting using popsicle sticks and turtle number cards.  I got the cards from here.

Arranging nests and zebra according to size.

 

LANGUAGE

 

Self correcting alphabet puzzle.

 

Sound and read cards.  Read about it here.

PLAY

Play pretend.  Read it here.

 

    

PRACTICAL LIFE

Using tweezer to transfer pompoms.  First time he encountered this... and he finds it hard to control.  I still have to look for a plastic tweezer because metal ones are very danger.

SCIENCE

Life Cycle of a Chicken.

 

Working with Farm Animals

Mavi is into his farm animals collection.  He keeps asking for them every time he comes home from school.  So what I did was gave him activities related to his interest.

Free play of farm animals toob.

I made him match the animals to that on the book.  I got him the Safari Farm Toobs.  I love this toy because they’re very accurate with their replicas plus it’s lead free.

Then we have the 3-part cards.  I used it to tell him a story, or just match the picture cards to that on the control cards.

That week I also cooked pork stew with corn.  Mavi matched the corn with his plastic corn cob toy hehe.  I was so surprise when he did that.

Chicken grid game.  We didn’t push this through because he wants to play with it on his own way.  He was more interested in throwing the dice in the air and catching it rather then doing the counting.

 

More of animal miniatures.

And this time, we made use of our moveable alphabet.  We name the animals and read the words using phonetic sounds.

Books we read about farm animals.  We also used these books to play matching game.

Language Red Series: r a m f b i t g

My Montessori Journey has a wonderful idea of pre-school Montessori language and I just couldn’t resist but make one for Mavi.

So I figured that I should re-do my alphabet activities since Mavi knows all his letters already.  And since we are on the stage of learning to read and write, I adapted the system of My Montessori Journey of teaching letters on how they will be used in reading.

Thus... the ramfbitg, cusnpolh and dgyzqwejkvx.

Presenting to you my red series, consisting ramfbitg letters.  So my letters usually consist of the following:

• letter sound book which has the same function as that of My Montessori Journey
• the read book which consist of 4 images.  I just collected four coloring images from the internet and stick them on the pages of the read book
• then we have the Itsy Bitsy books.  Too bad, these books are available for consonants only
• tracing letters for lowercase I use the Kumon Wipe Clean Lowercase letters (not shown)
• a guide for building letters and the foam building letters (not shown)
• a lower and uppercase plastic magnetic letters
• a lowercase sandpaper letter
• an uppercase tracing letter which I just downloaded from the net and placed in a poster

Here’s the sound letter.  Mavi glued the letter on the paper after we sand the letter “r” song based on the tune of Leapfrog.

The read book. 

The building letters.  Here’s Mavi doing the letter A.  I’m still looking for lowercase building letters.

We will be working with these materials for a while... because it seems that Mavi loves this scheme and it’s really organized.  With this scheme I don’t have to think of what to do with the letters every week!

Car Wash

To encourage him to play-pretend, I bought him his first ever “real” toy... a Car Wash set.  When he saw it, he was so excited and keeps asking me and his dad to open the box.  It took me, my husband and my sis-in-law to open and set-up this play set.  I didn’t realize that it’s that complicated to assemble. 

Anyway, the toy rocks! It kept Mavi busy for hours!  He keeps on laughing whenever the car would loop or slide down.  He also loves to manipulate the “elevator” of the play set.  The only grudge I have with the play set is that it only comes with one toy car.  I was expecting there would be about three cars included but much to my dismay, there was only one.  Mavi would have enjoyed it better if there were more cars to play with. So for now, he’s happy with one car... but of course I will add more so he can play with it much much better.  (We don’t give him gifts during the holiday, since we buy him stuff all year round, depending on his needs.  So I guess this serves his Christmas gift already.)

                         

Finally, a DO-A-DOT Marker!

If there was one thing I was happy about our trip... it was because I was finally able to buy a Do-A-Dot Markers.  Maverick loves it so much!  We use it in coloring, stamping and of course counting. 

Send one to my dear niece too... and my SIL told me she enjoys using it as well.

Art materials are so addicting!

Color Your Homeschool with Pasta!

Rainbow pasta is a favorite of mine as of the moment.  I love love looking at them, and of course use them for homeschool.

It’s so easy to make! Gather various shapes of pasta like bowtie, penne, Rotelle, macaroni, shells etc.  In a measure the right of pasta you wanted to use then put it in the zipper bag.  Add around 1 tablespoon of alcohol and drop 5-10 drops of food color into the bag.  Close the zipper bag, mix or shake the bag until all the pasta are covered with color.  You can leave the pasta inside the bag for around 5 to 10 minutes.  To dry, cover a try or a cookie sheet with kitchen towel.  Carefully pour out the colored pasta, spread it out in single layer for faster drying.

Here’s how my son and I use our pasta:

1.  Stringing and beadings.  This is only good for penne pasta.

  

2.  Used as counters for our counting activities.  In here I used an egg carton box as the tray.  The purpose here is to represent the amount of pasta based on the numbers written at the bottom of each box.

3.  Playdough Tower

4.  Color sorting activity.  Here I used again an egg carton box, paint it, let it dry and vuela!  If you used different shapes of pasta, you can also do a shape sorting activity as well!

Why not try it, right?? It’s a lot more cheaper that buying colored wooden blocks or pattern kits :-)

Number Puzzle

This week, we did a number puzzle similar to that of the letter puzzle we had.  I have these magnetic numbers months ago but couldn’t find any use for it so I just write the numbers 0 – 9 on a cardstock and made Mavi watch the magnetic letters to that on what is written on the puzzle.

Though it’s just a simple activity but my son was glued to it! It is also said that this will train little ones to sequence or order the correct numbers visually.

DIY Playdough Mats

 

My son is very happy with these playdough shape mats I made for him.  I just drew different shapes from a paper, using different colored pens and covered it with a tape (contact paper or laminate if available). 

The first time we played with it, he wasn’t so interested because he was just too busy playing with the PlayDoh.  Then this morning I took it out again and showed him that I formed a square using green the dough on the Square Mat.  Then he was so eager that we do the rest of the shape! It’s a good thing that I use different colors on the mats so we can match the dough’s color on the shape as well.

I did the whole thing though, I just let him help me press the dough for he can’t figure out yet how to form shapes with playdough.

 

Here’s what he did when I gave him the rest of the mats.  He kept on showing “So nice!”. I still need to add more PlayDoh to correspond with the rest of the colors/shapes. 

Letter Puzzles

This activity was inspired by the Activity Mom’s blog. 

Using a cardstock, I traced my son’s Melissa and Doug Magnetic Alphabet so he can match the uppercase letters to that on the outline on the letter puzzle mat.  Another advantage of this puzzle is that he learns how to arrange the letters from A to Z.

 

Melissa and Doug Magnetic Alphabet is a sure winner! You can do a lot of things with this toy.  Remember my post about the Alphabet BINGO? 

I wish I could have added one set of this magnetic toy and at the same got the Number Magnets as well.  I plan to make a lowercase version of this, maybe a matching game for the upper and lowercase too.