Learning About East Asia

If you’ve been following my blog, we started our Asia Unit last month and so far we successfully completed our Southeast Asia Study.  In this post, I present to you materials and activities we worked last week for East Asia. 

Maps and Flags

As you all by now, we ALWAYS start our continent/country study with maps and flags.  This will familiarize the child of the subject’s location and each of the country’s national symbol.  For the East Asia, we identified three major countries: China, Japan and South Korea

Materials:

• Asia in a Nutshell
• Asian Flags Nomenclature Cards Pack

Again, we used Lego to recreate flags.  This activity is similar to our Southeast Asia flag activity.

Famous Landmarks

We have painting/crafts activity and Lego play.  Our tablet is very useful for this activity.  We used it to view pictures (for clear view) and watch videos related to our study. 

Materials

• Asian Landmarks Cards for other activities (3-part cards, fact cards).
• Lego
• Paints
• Pink Tissue Paper

Famous landmark for Japan is Mount Fuji

             

 

We chose Great Walls of China as our subject here.  Here we use our fact cards, which Mavi reads while we view the bigger picture in our tablet.

Calligraphy

We are using the Japanese numbers in this activity.  I painted the characters on papers and cut them for presentation.  Now Mavi has to make the characters as well.

After the activity, Mavi was like “Mom it is so difficult!”. 

 

Animals

We’ve studied Asian Animals previously, so in this activity we’re doing a Panda puzzle.  I printed this from DLTK Kids, and Mavi has to color and form the Panda according to the cheat card.

 

Arts and Crafts

We made oriental fans and learned how to make origami items.  For the oriental fans, we used paper plates, used watercolor for the background and black tempera paint for the details.  Our origami papers are homemade because the real ones are so expensive in this side of the world.  They’re colored crafts paper and I cut them to a size of 6 x 6 inches.

Books

We used lots of books, but here are my son’s favourites [aff.links]:

• Letters Around the World:  China --->> OUR FAVOURITE SERIES!
• Discover Countries:  Japan

For more Asia Unit please check my Pinterst Board Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Continent Study: Asia on Pinterest.

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History and Geography

Bahay Kubo (Nipa Hut)

Bahay Kubo is square shaped house with no divisions, just a door and windows.  It is made up of local materials such as wood or bamboo or  nipa grass.  It is a Philippine icon and represents the Filipino culture.  Note that these houses are raised, for proper ventilation I guess since the flooring is made up of bamboo.  Another reason is to avoid the flood.

Yes I have seen Bahay Kubo and have friends and relatives who used to live on this type of house.  Until now, they still exist and I can’t wait to show them to Mavi.  He has always been fascinated with Bahay Kubo. Maybe he can’t imagine how people can live on just a square house. 

Thus, I decided to create a model using cardboard boxes from Book Depository. 

There are still people who lives in this stilt houses and I can’t wait to show it to Mavi when we visit the folks this year :)

I cut out the cardboard boxes into strips then stick them on a wooden BBQ skewers.

And here’s how the skeleton  looks like when all four sides are attached.

Adding the roof which is made up of cardstock and a wooden ladder here’s the end product.

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Books for Artists Study

I miss our Artist Study.  Mavi enjoyed our Artist Study sessions.  This was when there was no Vito yet and when my hands are not full :)   Mavi is very much intrigued on the lives of some greatest artists, he loves to listen to their life stories and the paintings that they made.  I have attempted this a million times, to reboot this lessons but the baby is a big factor. We’ll just have to set this aside and revisit this once Vito can join us.

Now I made this post to introduce two sets of books that Mavi and I really really love and enjoyed reading.  I found these in our library… but of course they don’t have the complete set which I dream of owning someday.  They are for keeps :)

The first set of the books are from James Mayhew. The books are all about Katie, who loves to visit museums with her grandma and when no one is watching, the paintings come alive.  My son loves this idea of Katie going inside the painting and meeting the characters on it.    We’ve read some of it and here are our favourites arranged according to how much we like them.

 

• Katie’s Picture Show 
• Katie and the Waterlily Pond
• Katie and the Impressionist
• Katie and the Starry Night
• Katie and the Sunflowers
• Katie and the Spanish Princes
• Katie and Monalisa
• Katie and the Dinosaurs

The second set of books that we also love are from Laurence Anholt.  This time the stories are all about children meeting great artists.  The books are more focused on the artist’s life rather than the paintings they’re made.  Now these books are pretty popular in the library so they are seldom available.  I plan to purchase them as gifts later on.  As I said, these books are worth-it.

Books we’ve read from the series:

             

• Camille and the Sunflowers
• Degas and the Little Dancer
• Leonardo and the Flying Boy
• Picasso and the Girl with a Ponytail

And there you go, my picks for studying great artists.  Hope you checkout the books using my affiliates.  Don’t worry, you won’t be charge or there’s no additional cost.  I will just earn a teeny weeny commission if you order through my links (affiliates).  And don’t hesitate to get your books from Book Depository because it is FREE DELIVERY NATIONWIDE.

Thank you and hope that this post helps.

Fun Under the Sun

If you are wondering what we're doing when the sun is up, here's a glimpse.

First I would take the boys in our backyard and do some little picnic.  The little one stays on his Mamas & Papas Baby Snug (Green) and plays with me.

Now for the big brother it's a little bit different.  Here you see him playing with his "fossil collections".   These are actually rocks in the yard that he gathered.  The Dinosaur Train inspired him to collect "fossils".  So these rocks are now piled in the yard.

 

After he checks his collection, I made him do some splatter painting.  A few days ago, I was telling him the story of Pollack, of how he paints using splatters.  After that we watched this video of a little girl who's famous of her painting.

 

Now that he is inspired, it's time to put his artistic side to action :)

             

Oh boy, how he love it!!  We just have to move to the grass though because it's getting messier.

Springtime is Flower-time!

Hi everyone!  There are lots of daffodils growing in the yard and Mavi has been constantly picking them up for his "collection".  So to make use of the flowers I pulled out our flower nomenclature cards and told him that he will need to dissect the daffodils to learn about its part.

Since we did this activity a few years ago, he was so excited to do it again.  Kids love to do this!  I know how dreadful it is to learn about the parts of a flower (with all those weird names).  But if you get to this activity with your kids, with a tactile activity, they will definitely learn faster and the retention is much better.

             

As we dissect the daffodil, I would ask him questions like "how does the petals feel like?", "why do you think that some flowers are yellow some are red?".  As we go along, I also discuss the functions of each parts.  He mentioned that his favorite parts are the petals and the stamens because according to him, these makes the flower look beautiful.

           

If you are interested, you can this Parts of the Flower and Definition booklet by clicking the image below:

Afterwhich we read our book How Flowers Grow and look at the pictures of the different kinds of flowers around the world.

I was also inspired to make flowers in popsicle sticks.  I love how these flowers turned out!   You can place them in a vase and stick them using a playdough or clay :)

            

In our case, we found a purpose for these flowers in our math activity which I will talk about in my next post, so stay tuned!

For more FREEbies and learning aids, please check The Pinay Homeschooler Shop and Downloads.

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Botany Unit on Pinterest.

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The Solar System and The Planets II

My son completed his mini project of our Solar System unit and he finally got to display it in his room.  It was a simple project for my 5 years old, something that I made him work during the midterm break.

I mentioned this previously in my post that we're going to plot the planets in a black craft paper.  First thing, he placed all the INNER PLANETS.  My son memorizes the order so I made he did all the work here.  I decided that it would be best to label the planets so he can memorize the spelling.

As you can see, we added "asteroids"  after Mars.

 

Then he continued with the OUTER PLANETS.

 

When everything is in place, he added stars (stickers).

And we both stick it on the wall using blutacks. And look how pretty it is! He was so happy how it turned out.  He felt proud of what he has accomplished! And I have to say that the use of foil in planets made such a huge difference!!  Now this is art and learning combined :)

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Phases of the Moon

It's my son's midterm break and I'm happy that we could do lots of activities now that he's at home the entire week.  Aside from the Internal Organs which we had earlier this month, we will also have lessons on Space and Astronomy.

Here are the activities we've been doing so far:

A Model of the Moon Phases.  We painted the phases for this year instead of using our felt moons :) 

 

He arranged the phases using the cards that we have and  a picture that we saw in Google.

 

 

And here's the finish product.  This artwork is now in his room.  He would refer to this at night whenever he checks for the phase the of the moon.

 

Observe and Describe. I also printed out this Moon Phases Mini-Book from Scholastic (please click the image below for the link of the file).  Here Mavi gets to describe the different phases.  I love how he can use one single word to describe the moon.

Moon Phase Calendar.  Every night we're checking out the moon and record it in the calendar which I made. If you are interested I made a generic calendar which you can use.  Just click on the image below for the link.

This recording will allow Mavi to learn how it all works!

 

Below is our reference.  We check this image (from Google) if the ones we are seeing is the same as the ones recorded in the internet :)

Here's a link to all astronomy related activities that we have done so far.

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