Author: Liesl - Homeschool Den
We talked about mud slides and land slides. Mud slides usually occur after heavy rains, so our butter container (again covered with our sand/corn flour concoction) was watered for a time and the mud slid down the “mountain.” The girls enjoyed playing in the mud for a long time after that while LD kept exploding his volcano again and again!
JULY 2009’s postings are all preschool/toddler related. I’veposted a lot of the homemade (and Montessori) typeactivities I’ve put together for my 3 year and 18 month oldand placed them together in one month for easy access.
About four months ago we started really delving into worldgeography. We started with the seven continents. We got some beautiful (free) 3-part continent cards and havebeen using them in conjunction with this map I had fromteaching days (it’s from world history, the age of explorationand the kids just love the fact that people believed in seamonsters (on the map if you look closely). Anyway, we’ve learned the continent song (to...
The continents cards (both the small and large cards in the post above) are available in our World Animal Packet. We placed world animal cards on each continent. There are three for each continent. LD, DD and I take turns saying, “This is a __buffalo__ it lives in __North America___” and putting it on the correct continent. There is a much more recent post about Animals Around the World with...
We spend a fair bit of time learning about geography. A lotof it is incidental because we have a world map hanging on thewall behind the dining room table. LD likes to test us, “whereis South Africa? Where is Brazil?” But we also have a fewgeography activities that show up in the workboxes everycouple of weeks. Pictured below is DD (age 3) doing a continent push pin map.I printed it...
I don’t like this anywhere near as much as the push pin andfoam that I made (pictured above), but here is the flag andcountry matching activity. It was made with a laminatedmap of Asia taped onto of styrofoam (and placed in the boxso our toddler wouldn’t destroy the styrofoam!) We still pullthis out every few weeks. I think I got the Asia flags (free) from this site:http://www.montessorimaterials.org/geo.htm If you are...
We got a wonderful assortment of mini erasers from OrientalTrading and have been using them for all kinds of math and sorting activities. Below LD did skip counting by 3s (http://filefolderfun.com/FirstGradeMath.html)and grouped three items below each wagon. I asked himhow many items there would be with 4 groups of 3 (12) andso forth. DD did some general counting (pictured below) while ED,the toddler, just put the erasers and numbers into...
DD did a couple of different masks while LD made a knight’shelmet out of paper mache. He came across this project in aScooby Doo magazine and begged to do it. “I’ll even get my handsdirty this time!” he told me. (The first time we did a paper macheproject he didn’t want to get his hands dirty with the flour-glue.) Paper mache recipe: mix 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. ...
We tried this spider web craft that we came across at http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/2008/01/colorful-spiderweb.html
LD made this cardboard tank about a month ago. He wasvery excited by this project so I thought I’d share theinstruction link for others if you’re interested:http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Make-a-Cardboard-tank/
Most every week Mom puts up a new artist in our weeklycalendar. Below are pictures by Norman Rockwell andAlbert Bierstadt. We’ve also done some of the followingartists:Leonardo DaVinciMichelangeloRembrandtVan Gogh I usually post a self portrait of the artist and we talkbriefly about each picture (what they see, what they likeor don’t like about it) and leave it at that. I notice it doessink in as LD noticed a Van Gogh’s...
We did a “country box” exchange with another familywho lives and homeschools in China. The kids werevery excited to open their box of goodies. We weretruly overwhelmed by their generosity and it madeour study of China fantastic! The Chinese paper cuttings you see below are sointricate; its hard to believe they are done with scissors. In the first picture below you can see the kids are wearingscarves. Chinese school kids...
One of LD’s journal writing activities one day was to describehis favorite painting.
LD worked very hard to put together a book on China. We have a new binding gadget and have moved awayfrom lapbooking and instead are putting pages togetherwith a comb binder. He did some sand writing (China andthe GreatWall using glue/colored sand). He did somelapbook elements (the capital of China, the flagand thingslike that). He did some Chinese writing(with the answersfolded up on the left). We read some interesting storiesfrom...