Life Cycle of a Ladybird

My son had been playing with his insect toys lately and since it’s summer, I decided that it was time for an insect study.  Honestly, I am terrified of insects... so it took me awhile to do something like this... because the sight of them give me the creeps.

Anyway, first on the list is the study of Ladybird. Yeah, that’s what we call them here instead of “ladybugs”.  I told my son that they’re just the same... and I made him use the word “ladybird “ for convenience. 

Here’s some of the books I borrowed from the library that is ladybird-related. 

Then I also borrowed a “bug” book and it has a few pages discussing the ladybird and it’s life cycle.  I love that it shows the detailed growth of the said bug in real pictures.

 

 

After I presented it to my boy, I printed out the Ladybug Life Cycle from Montessori Print Shop and have him color it.

I love his choice of colors! They’re all bright and vivid.

 

Oh and he wrote the labels.  I made him trace my handwriting though.

Then after that, we did some crafts for the life cycle just like what we did with the Frog.  I realized that I only took a few photos because I was busy directing and helping him out.

And here’s the end product.  Lovely isn’t it?

Continent: South America (with PRINTABLES)

Saw lots of books about South America a few weeks ago, so I decided to have it for our Continent study.

I love these books as well for they’ve got lots of pictures showing the culture, food and lifestyle of people in Brazil.  My son enjoyed reading books about children in different culture.  

And these were my favorite!  They were very specific and informative.  Suited enough for a home study of South America. 

Of course, studying a continents includes map.  Here’s my little boy, familiarizing the South America map.

And I made flag pins as well!  He’s interested in maps lately and love identifying each one.  I love the fact that he can now associate a flag to a county and on a specific location on the map.

 

I also made the landmarks.  I only made a few since this topic is not really an interest of his.

From the books above, I made a summary of South American animals.  You can download a copy of it here.

 

As we discuss each animal, I showed him a video of each so he can see how they behave and what are they like in real life.

Since I’ve got Rainforest Safari Toob, we also played matching game using my DIY control cards and the animal figures.

     

Same as the animal cards, I also made one for the plants of South America.  You can download it here.

Just before we wrap-up our study, my son matched the landmarks to its location using the flags :)

I wanted to cook some South American foods as well, but I discovered that some of our native foods (Filipino) are similar to that in South America.  So instead of showing him pictures, I might as well prepare those foods with him.

Hope you like it!

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 :)

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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.

 

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Leaves in Watercolor

We made this simple artwork which involves a pastel color, liquid watercolors and watercolor paper.  

 

 

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Lifecycle of a Frog

We revisited the frogs theme before we went on a vacation because we’ve been spending too time looking at ponds and frogs around the park. 

Here, we worked on the lifecycle of frogs using some colored papers.

 

 

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