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.

Study of Plants

Mavi is 31 months old.

The Lenten Season gave Mavi and I a little more time to do some interesting things together.  Since on weekdays he’s in school and most of our weekends are spent on the mall doing groceries and playing at the playground, we never get the chance to do quality homeschool together.  So I am so happy to share what we did during the long weekend vacation.

We read books about plants.  Luckily, I discovered two wonderful books at the library that contains precisely the things that I wanted to teach/show Mavi about plants.

 

For art related activities, we make tree and leaf prints using water color and paints.

He was a little bit hesitant to apply paints on the leaf but as I was showing him what to do, he eventually participated and was happy of the end result. 

Our leaf prints art.

Of course, we identified the different parts of the plants using the vegetables on the fridge.  I didn’t have any flower and fruits to present to him.

We studied the parts of a leaf as well.   

And he ended up cutting the leaves hehehe, incorporating fine motor skills to our science lesson.

Tot School Wrap-Up Week 3

Mavi is 30 months old.

BOOKS

Books we’ve been reading this week:

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Mr. Brown Can Moo
• The Very Busy Spider
• Usbourne’s Chicken Licken

View Full Album

CRAFTS

For this week he was the one picked the letter craft.  After scanning all through the letters that we have, he finally picked uppercase letter I for our activity.

 

This is Mavi’s I for Iguana version.  If interested, you can view the basic procedures from here.  I wanted to make a separate post for our letter crafts but I’m a little bit preoccupied right now. Promise to do interesting post next time.

Then I showed to him the oil pastel and talked about how it’s different from crayons.  We later did the Oil Pastel Art that I posted here.

Since coloring books are so expensive on this side of the planet... I collected a view clipart from the net and printed them all out on a piece of A4 paper.  At first he just shaded everything.  Then I showed him how to properly "color or  shade” areas of a picture.  So tried another set of coloring pictures and finally he was able to color each photos.  As you can see, he can color areas of each clipart... he needs more practice though.  I want him to learn that each picture is different from the other so he can color each one separately and just within the area or lines.  But of course with his age, I can truly understand that he can’t color images within the lines yet.

MATH

We did the math color-number wheel here.

Then arrange butterflies and caterpillars according to their size.  He learned how to use the word “medium” with this activity.

And we did a lot of dot-math using our do-a-dot markers.

 

LANGUAGE

I introduced a new activity for this week.  Was a little bit inspired on the language section.  You can read about our activity here.

 

We re-visited our Itsy Bitsy Books and this time he wanted to read it all by himself.  He reads the book by sounding each letters first, then read the pictures.  He can’t read yet but I know that he can identify all the pictures on the Itsy Bitsy.  So everytime I took these books from the shelves, he would pretend reading it hehe.

 

PRACTICAL LIFE

In line with our Very Hungry Caterpillar book, I printed out this “ordering” printables from the internet.  The point here is to order the events of what happened from the book.  I was so surprise to see Mavi identify all the fruits and foods mentioned in the book without me telling him.

Say, I asked him about the 5 oranges... he would look at the cut-outs for a while then pick the 5 oranges pictures.  Can he actually count the 5 items? Or can he just identify the oranges?  I asked him about the plums too... and he picked the correct cut-out again! 

Some sensorial activities... making our very own caterpillar and butterfly.

Then he helped his grandmother arrange the spoons and fork in the kitchen cabinet.  We didn’t ask him to do it but he did.

And while his Dad was sick, the little guy behaved the whole time... for he was very very busy painting his car!

SCIENCE

Yehey! We did science this week.  I took out our “Butterfly Life Cycle” and the “Life Cycle of an Apple” nomenclature cards and we matched the pictures.  Since I guess he’s too young for some detailed stuff, what I do here is I would tell him a story based on the pictures of the chronological event of a certain species..which is the butterfly and the apple.

After having discussions with him, asking him the colors in the picture, how big it is or how small... we would match the pictures cards to the control cards.  I am surprise that he’s learning a lot from this activity.  His word bank just keeps growing and growing. Aylavet!

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 :-).