Botany Unit: Trees and Leaves

Last week's activities. Sorry if I have to flood this post with pictures as I am short on words.  Migraine affects my thinking most of the time :(

               

Leaf matching worksheets from Education.com and my Tree Shapes matching cards (including sorting cards).

              

Leaf prints.  We did not do much of this as Mavi told me they were also doing this in school. 

Examining the parts of a leaf. He was really interested on this one.  Our cards and booklet were from my Leaf Pack or you can read about it here.

               

He loves identifying the parts.  I'm thankful that we are surround with plants so it's easier to pick leaves with pronounced parts.

                

And instead of bark rubbings (it rained the entire week), we talked about how the leaves and trees changes according to seasons. 

              

Note:  We were supposed to have leaf shapes as well.  We did this last year and my son had fun collecting leaves from our estate and at the park.  Unfortunately, the weather did no cooperate and we ended up staying at home the whole time we're doing this unit.  I was quite disappointed.  But... since summer is not over yet, we'll try to have this one when Mr Sun will shine brightly again. 

 

And I could not find my leaf sorting cards!  And with that I might have a little re-organizing and cleaning up to do next month.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Spring Carnival

Trees in 4 Seasons

We made these wonderful trees last week and I think it deserves a post!

Materials needed:  some colored tissue paper and 4 tree trunks (cut-out from paper bags)

 

Cut the tissue paper into small pieces and crumple each.  For the trunks, glue them on a white paper or cardstock.  You might work on one tree at a time.  Such as here, we started with summer... thus the green tissue.  I also advice to use some range from light to dark colors for some accent.  My son had fun gluing the leaves on the trees!

 

Here's our winter and spring trees.  My son decorated the winter tree with some "snowy leaves" on the ground and leaving the tree almost bare.  Our spring tree is a Cherry Blossom thus the color pink.

 

For summer, we have light and dark green leaves and for autumn he wanted yellow and orange with leaves on the ground.

 

And this is how they turned out... and I love it! They all look good together!  I'll find a suitable frame for them so I could hang and display them in sitting room:)

 

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Spring Carnival

Sorting leaves and leaf BINGO game

To make use of our leaf cards, I printed out two samples for each leaf shapes so Mavi can practice sorting them out.  Again, this was challenging to him.

 

 

And later on, I discovered this leaf BINGO game from the net.  The game itself was quite complicated, so we didn’t follow it as instructed.  We just use it to play simple BINGO game... the first one to fill his/her card with leaves wins the game.

He loves to draw out the leaves from the paper bag. And is very happy to learn that he can match it to his card.

He won the game :)

Linking to:

Leaf Shapes

Mavi and I have been collecting leaves to use for our leaf/leaves study.   I purchased this Botany Cabinet Shapes cards from Montessori Print Shop to introduce the different leaf shapes. 

Then I had my son observe each leaf that we have collected, to look at it for while and differentiate each one from another.

We matched the leaves to the control cards.  This portion here was very challenging.  It was hard to identify the shapes of some leaves :)

I didn’t want to dispose the leaves yet so I decided that we might take a look at leaf margins as well.  Here we tape the leaves to a white paper and observe the margins of each leaf for a while. Then I made him trace the leaves.  We differentiated that some leaves have smooth margins, while others were spiky.

 

This is what we ended up later.

 

Linking to:

Homeschool Wrap-Up

Mavi is 38 months old.

These days, my son isn’t into homeschooling.  All he wanted to do was play-pretend Artzooka or Mister Maker.  Whenever I ask him if he wants to play a game, he would always say “No, I’m playing artzooka.”  And this is the reason why I, at the moment, postponed my planned homeschool curriculum and decided to whip out activities randomly whenever he wants to do some ‘schooling’.  I really don’t want to take that play pretend at the moment because he really really enjoys pretending that he can create crafts and stuff without me being there. 

I am religious in reading books to him in the morning, but there were times that I get to be busier during the day so I would up reading books on him in the afternoon or during bedtime.  Sometimes, I also forget to read books because of chores and personal work.  So I decided to read at least one book everyday just to ensure that we have read a book.  And this week, we read Gingerbread Man (and The Very Busy Spider, The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Billy Goat Gruff and Kid’s Bible, etc).  Here  Mavi took out the animals that appeared in the Gingerbread Man story and in The Very Busy Spider.  We did some role playing using these animals.

We made Gingerbread Man paper dolls and dress them up.  My son enjoyed this the most!

 

Made window ornaments using colored tissue, construction paper and contact paper.

MATH

Practice counting using the leaves as we were discussing about the season Fall the other day.

Then we work with some patterns.  I downloaded this from here.

In lieu of Thanksgiving, we made our Gratitude Leaves and hung them in his room.  While I wrote all the things that I am thankful for, my expressed his gratitude by drawing those things in the leaves! (He’s busy with his Button Snake)

 

Counting from numbers 1 to 50 using these number chip cards which I made out of cardstock.

I made these CVC cards so we can practice more of CVC words. We're done working with our pink series and before I move to blue series, I wanted to expose him to other cvc words, those that were not included in our pink series set.

 PRACTICAL LIFE/SKILLS

I made this button snake for him to practice buttoning (and unbuttoning).  He got hooked! I was surprised to discover that it was difficult for him to insert the button in the felt squares. But after a few tries... he finally figured out how to do it.  I plan to make a few more, and vary the button shapes/sizes.

 

He’s just into writing these days. His favorite sketch pad is my notebook even though there are plenty of paper around the house! Thank goodness he doesn’t write on the wall.

 

Tearing paper and gluing them.  He wasn’t into this activity.

I am still trying to expose him to painting.  For some reason, he lost his interest in painting.  He just wants to draw(using oil pastels) and write... and painting his least favorite. Maybe, it’s because he doesn’t have a suitable table to paint, and is not comfortable doing this activity on the floor :) Yep, we’re still looking for his work table.  And we left his Crayola Paints back in SG, so that means, I need to shell out a few more cashing(again) to get him some paints.

 

Playdoh free play.  Always a favorite :)

FIELD TRIPS/OUTDOORS

A friend asked if we do outdoor activities.  Of course we do! We never missed an opportunity to go out when there’s sun! I’m an outdoor person and I wanted my son to pass that to my son :) It’s just that, well I wanted to keep those moments private so I try not to talk about it here nor post pictures of it.  So here’s the proof that we do go out.  This was when we took a day tour at the city center.  We visit this beautiful park where we get to see lots of ducks on the pond.  Then we walked our way around, do some sightseeing and just enjoy the crowd, the sun and mother nature.

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