The Arctic and Antarctic Printable Pack

This month, my son and I will be doing a Polar Region theme.  And because of adrenalin rush and with much inspiration, I was able to create these printable for us to use.  My son loves it and I am so happy and proud of how it turned out!  And yes, it is suited for preschoolers as well.  When I created this, I made sure that the little brother can also use this in the future :) 

So what's included in the file? 

First, there are activities and printables for the the six penguins of Antarctica.  Activities include:

• Beginning sounds
• Matching cards
• Reading and Spelling cards

 

Second, the activities for the animals of the Arctic Region. Activities include:

• Beginning sounds
• Matching cards
• Match the silhouettes
• Reading and Spelling cards

I also pre pared Math activities to go along with the Polar Regions theme.  Expect:

• Counting cards
• Matching numbers with objects
• Patterning (templates and picture chips)

And lastly, there's the fact cards that most of us parents love! 

So in case you'll be doing some Antarctica Unit for geography or doing an Arctic theme... you know where to look!  The file is 30 about 30 pages with more than 10 activities for the price of 2.50USD.  How cool is that?

Just click any of the pictures for the file's link.

Thank you!

Thoughts on Reading

Caught my son reading the Polar Express early today before he goes to school.  I am amazed on how far he has taken off from the the time he was able to decode the blends.

My son started reading books when he was 3 years of age.  That time, I have a good supply of books with lots of CVC words (beginners) and sight words and that's what he would read. And surprisingly, he can read and spell complicated words as well. And I believe that the secret to this success was reading lots and lots of books with him from an early age (months old!). 

So to those who doesn't know where to begin, my advice is that... start reading books to your kids.  Do it on a daily basis.  Make it as part of your routine. From here, you can start learning phonics or any available program/technique suited for you.

For my son, there was no fancy program... I just  used the concept of Montessori when I was teaching him the phonics and how to start reading.

For reference, here are some of the activities we do at home to learn how to read:

Blue and Green Series

Language lessons

Spelling

Montessori Green Series

Beginning and Ending Sounds

Montessori Pink Series

Update on Pink Series

Word Family Strips

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me

New Beginnings for 2014!

Happy New Year to all my readers! How were the holidays like for you?

As for me, my December vacation was all about fulfilling my duties as a mother and wife.  Everyone in the family got sick and the baby and I were the only ones spared by the flu, which left me taking good care of everyone else.  It was so tiring but nevertheless we were still able to the New Year bug-free. 

But my blogging hiatus gave me the chance to contemplate and plan for my activities for 2014.  Oh I am so excited to be back in the blogging world and back on our daily routine of doing interesting stuff at home! I just couldn't figure out yet how we could have afterschool activities now that we have a new baby to care for as well :)  I guess, Mavi and I will eventually adapt and discover a routine that best suits us. (So expect some rants of handling two kids in my future post LOL)

To each and everyone, I thank you for a wonderful 2013! Thank you so much for participating in my blog, leaving comments, appreciating what I do and sharing some of your ideas as well.  Thank you for those who support my little shop and I promise to come up with more affordable learning materials this year.  And to show my appreciation, I will also be sharing a lot of freebies!

So cheers to new beginnings! And I am wishing you all a fabulous and productive New Year!

December Update :)

Hello! It's been a long time since my last post. As most of you know, we recently welcome the newest member of our little family and he's the reason why I haven't been on a the web lately.  My time is mostly spent nursing, and taking good care of the 3 boys.  And the fact that my Mom and sister in law are here for the holidays, we're skipping a few after school activities.

Anyway, here's a brief update on what we've been doing so far:

Weekends, my little family would visit parks to enjoy the good weather.

We also had a Mexican Unit.  I already posted the first part.  The second part of our Mexican Unit were mostly crafts and worksheets.

 

Then for Math, we're doing Snake Game...

 

and learning about quantities using math cubes: greater than, smaller than, one more than the other etc.

Language, we're using moveable objects for our blue and green series.  I will talk more about on this soon.

 

Mavi's busy with his Nativity Play.  He has a big role on it so he practices his line every day as well as reading lots of Christmas books :)

And as for me and hubby, we're busy raising a family :)

I am currently planning our 2014 activities and will share it once I'm done. It's a flexible plan and will serve as a guide.  With a new baby, anything can happen and change on the fly... so it is always best to have a guide. 

Taking pictures would also be challenge as I nurse little X most of the time.  So I'll attempt to "copy" the technique of Mari Ann of Counting Coconuts by taking pictures ahead of time so my hands will be free during the actual activity.

I am thankful for...

... the answered prayers.

... God's blessings we have received and yet to receive

... my mother who's with us right now

... a loving and supportive husband, my prince, my guiding star

... my 5 yrs old Mavi who rocked my world and turned my world upside down (in a good way)

... my 3 weeks old Zaev, who made me a morning person once again

and

... for old and new friends and fans (Facebook, Blogger and Pinterest) whom I met here remotely in the world wide web.  I have so much respect to all of you because of the inspiration you all have given me. 

Thank you!

Happy thanksgiving!

Artist Study: Frida Kahlo

Since we're having a Mexican Unit, I have been itching to tie in an artist that would go with our study.  And by no brainer, we had Frida Kahlo. 

Frida is a very famous Mexican artist who lived a very interesting yet sad life.  She's in pain because of the unfortunate events that happened in her life and one of which is having a vehicular accident.  Because of this, she stayed in the hospital for a long time.  To make herself happy, she painted.  She loves to paint self-portraits with things that would make her happy.

I wanted to delve deeper into the life of Frida but my knowledge of her is very limited.  Maybe when I have the luxury of time, I might as well spend it reading the life of famous artist so I can accurately relay the information to Mavi.  He loves learning about the lives of other people and how it reflects on their works.

Moving on... we started by looking at self-portraits of Frida from the web after which I made these portraits for us to work on.

Using an oil pastel, Mavi put colors on Frida's portrait according to his liking.

 

 

Then he made a self portrait.  He drew his face as I described it to him. He invested too much effort on this one!

"Mom! We should put this in the library!"

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

MEXICO, the place you thought you knew

It is so hard to to have after "school" activities lately as it gets dark early in the afternoon. Mavi would ask me why we're doing school in the evening when in fact it is just three in the afternoon.  Though we still have a lot of things to cover up before the year ends I'm not letting  myself stress out and be pressured of my "to dos".  As I always say, the journey of our schooling at home is all about the experience and fun that we have NOT entirely about the output.

Okay, enough ranting.  This post is all about our Mexico Unit which we started last week.  The materials that we used in this unit are the following:

• Flags of North America
• Flags of Australia/Oceania
• My Adventure Book (North America Edition)  (read about it here)

We started with flags.  We review the countries that we have studied so far and compare them.  As you can see we work on the 3 part cards, and country-capital city matching cards.  These are all included in the printables mentioned above.

 

We talked about the colors used in the Mexican flag, and Mavi discovered that Australia and the United States uses the red color as well! So we discuss the meaning of the red color (and why it is always used in flags) and the green color and what it means to the history of Mexico.

Aside from coloring, we made a Mexican flag similar to this project. We used tissue paper and a cardstock.

 

Mavi made an eagle at the center of the flag representing the coat of arms of Mexico.

Moving on... we also worked on the biomes of Mexico.  We did this with Australia, and I decided that we should try a different approach this time. 

We made a map of Mexcio (biomes) using PlayDoh. We use yellow for desert and light green for deciduous and tropical rainforest (I can't find a darker shade of green to represent the tropical rainforest).  Our maps (left) and Mavi's (right) show below.

 

And we added plants, animals and landmarks found in Mexico.

And that's it for now. I'll be posting a second part of our study as I don't want this post to end up like a novel LOL.

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

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!
All and things beautiful: history geography