Unwind #TuesdayTravel - Canada Part 2

I hope you guys got some time to try few of our introduction to Canada activities. Thanks for all the comments and emails. This week, we shall do some craft based on Canada.

 

Kids are always fasinated byanimals. Shravan used to play a world puzzle with animals on it all over instead of country names. So it gave in a high level overview of what animals are found in which continent/country.

Beaver is the national animal of Canada. So we did a paper plate beaver face.

Paint the paper plate brown. Use the attached template for their eyes, nose and mouth. If your kid is not really small enough, allow them to cut and paste. It might not come out perfect, but I prefer leaving it to their choice so that they will definitely learn tomorrow if not today.

I also taught him about the other animals found in Canada. We did few coloring pages and then flashcards of all the animals. Beaver, Canadian Goose and Moose to name a few.

 

Then we moved on to the national symbol of Canada - The Maple Leaf. I gave him a printout and he immediately started cutting and coloring. Well, we are still hunting for a maple leaf in the neighbourhood. Now that summer is here, we might find something soon. I asked him to collect one good leaf and preserve it.

 

 

My boy is a lego boy. Anything with lego, I am sure he would love it. After some googling, I found a CN Tower made of Lego. Used the concept to teach him the important places in Canada. Show them the pictures of Niagara Falls, CN Tower and Rockie Mountains to start with.

 

 

 

I wanted to slowly introduce history to Shravan but not with so many facts and dates. But with some interesting stories and pictures to show. I ended up in Totem Poles. We used a tissue paper holder and did lot of cut+paste+coloring.



We also learnt about Canadian Capital, Currencies, Sports. I also introduced him to Word Search.

I shall share Pictures of we making these craft and the simple lapbook Shravan managed to make.

Happy touring Canada.
 

Unwind #MondayMath - Numbering different ways

Last week we saw few methods as to how we can introduce numbers to kids. I just listed a few so that you can try those or explore more on the same line.

 

Now that the kids can recognize their 123s (You can try these number Boards to get them more hands on)

 

 

 

They soon come with another challange of recognizing the same number in different forms. So introduce the other possible ways also so that it becomes easy for them when they start counting, matching and other math workbook activities.

Teaching your children to count on their fingers

 

 

Make them open one finger everytime they say a number to start with. Then you can make them identify the number by how many are open and how many are closed. This is their basis for Learning counting.

Using Dice to identify numbers

Dice is another common and fun way to introduce number counting to kids.

You can familarise kids to dice using boardgames. Snake and ladder would be an ideal to start with.
If your kid is fond of drawing, try this.

 

Once they get famaliarised, we can check so by asking them to match them with numbers.

Identifying numbers using Objects

Most of the Math Activity books use different Objects when it comes to counting and matching. Objects make kids glued, fun for them and they just start counting without realising they are doing numbers. So explore different Objects of their interest.

Practice these until next week, we shall do number matching using all the techniques we have learnt these two weeks.

 

Unwind #ThursdayThrill - Solar System Part 1

So what next? ofcourse its Science. But being a kindergartner, Shravan still hasn`t heard or realised what he is learning is Science. I just tell him lets do Solar System or Lets do something in water or Lets play With magnets.

It really doesn't make any difference to him while learning about Canada or learning about Solar System. Because we follow the same pattern, loads of coloring, cut & paste, Puzzles, play With clay, legos, beads and so on.

First step, is creating interest to learn about something. Shravan saw this video I think almost 2 years back while learning rhymes and I am sure he still likes it. So start with this if you are going to introduce Solar system to your kid.

My obvious next search is for puzzles. Puzzles keeps him glued for sometime. Also I really like his technique of doing puzzles. First and Foremost, he always finishes it. Never gives up halfway, even if he does so, he always announce that it has to be left as it is and he will do the rest next day. His technique of filling a jigsaw puzzle is never random, he thinks a bit before putting a piece in its place. So I thought this playtime really helps him improve his concentration and spatial reasoning skill.

He has been doing this puzzle for almost an year now but somehow missed to click him doing. Will soon share a pic of the puzzle.

Try to get some posters and stick on their room. Seeing it everyday really helps. Try to print something catchy and colorful. Shravan has this in his room. 

Flash Cards are another option to learn more. We play swap the card, I have this, Who have this?, We keep inventing games every time or rather he invents most of the time :)

If you dont have a store bought one (We try DIY most of the time), check this PDF. Its free and fantanstic.

Solar System Trading Cards

Let me save the craft work we did for the next post.

Unwind #WordsworthWednesday - Sight word Games and A list

I really like the hashtag #WordsworthWednesday. Why because its rhyming and we are going to talk all about words. If your kid is studying in India, they would have learnt most of the common words by the age of 6-7 years. But the question is did they learn with some logic, understood their phonics, origin of words or know all the family words. If your kid is studying in United States, English is the spoken language we assume our kids learn by natural. 

But living in Norway where kids are not introduced to English (approximately 80% of the kids)  until they are 5-6 years. So I was always imagining it would be a nightmare for Shravan. But kudos to his Montessori where he quickly learnt the alphabets and Phonics in less than 3 months. 

He loves reading books and we do it every night at least for 15 minutes. We love to cuddle under over quilt and read aloud. Now he has started slowly asking me where is "and" written or where is "the" written. And the next time such frequent words pops out he reads before me. So I understood its time for him to learn sight words first and make our reading time more fun. We in parallel do family words as well.

There are numerous ways through which we can make this interesting with kids. We shall explore these methods as we continue exploring sight words.

This week I shall highlight three such method and a list of A sight words

Popsicle Stick Sight Word Puzzles

Roll a Dice Sight Word

Muffin Tray Tic O Tac

A list

a

an

at

as

am

are

and

all

ate

ask

any

away

after

about

again

More words and methods every Wednesday.

Unwind #TuesdayTravel - Canada - Part 1

Every Tuesday I will share with you little tit bits that can help you explore continents with your kids. My kiddo loves exploring continents and countries. So we slowly started expanding the horizon by learning little more about each country. 

In Part 1, I shall share what we planned to learn about that country and in Part 2, we shall share some of handwork we made related to that country and a simple lap book to start with. I am going to leave him lead the show, so the lap book may look very primitive to start with. Lets see how his or your kids imagination grows as they explore more.

So if you want to start the project along with us, please join. It will be fun sharing our kids experience. Trust me, its a good learning experience for the adults as well. 

Deciding which country to start with was not really that challenging as I thought. He immediately decided its Canada. Why on the globe Canada first . His best buddy in class is from there. 

First we started with where on the globe is Canada. He has the world map as his wall decal. So we always start from there. Then I make him identify in which continent it is located. So step 1 kids start to identify the countries in the world map and then in its continent. I give him printouts of both so that he can start coloring Canada. 

Outline of World Map

Closer look of Canada in North America

If the particular country has states in it, Show them that  as well. But I didnt insist too much on the states as of now. But just showed him there are many states within Canada.

My boy is a puzzle boy. So I decided to make a Puzzle based on the states of Canada. He was super excited as he was making his own puzzle. We used to above shown political map of Canada as reference.

I go with his interests so that its easy to make him sit glued in a place for sometime. Next is the flag time. He already knew the flag of Canada. So I just gave him an outline and he finished coloring in no time.

We made our own flag as well using fuse beads. This is another evening time pass activity for him. Doing so he learns to sit in a place patient for sometime, helps in hand eye co-ordination and gives him a good overview of spatial reasoning. 

If you are planning to explore the countries with us, start with these. We have more to do and learn about Canada. I dont want to dump everything in one post. In Part 2, I shall share how we learnt about Canadian animals, famous places, sports and specialties of Canada. 

Unwind #MondayMath - Number Recognition

 

Children of age 4-6 years love to explore patterns, sequence, shapes and numbers. They get hooked when we say come on, lets do some patterns or when we say shall we play hopscotch

 

So lets start practicing to say lets play maths instead of lets do maths.

 

1. Preschool children need to get used to the 'sound' of the numbers, i.e to recognize the spoken 'one', 'two' etc. Singing aloud to them number rhymes such as 'one, two, buckle my shoe', 'one, two, three, four five.." etc would get them used to recognizing the 'sound' of each number. You can slowly recite the numbers 1 to 5 at first and so on.

 

2. Try and relate numbers to everyday things, like you can show them one banana, two biscuits etc. Initially start with just one and two, later on, you can progress one by one.

 

3. Then you can help them relate the number to the symbol, i.e the written 1,2,3s.

 

Try this simple game to see if your kid can identify numbers 1 to 10

 

Have a bunch of foam numbers and\or plastic magnetic numbers, and make a heap of them between you and the child. You pick one, hold it up high and call out loud its name, such as "Number five!" and put it to you personal pile.

 

The child will then find the same number (make sure there are at least two of each number) and does the same, calling its name out loud and gathering the number to himself.

 

Then you reverse it so that it is first the child's turn to pick any number from the pile, call out its name, and put it to his pile, and you have to find the same number. After all the numbers in the middle pile were gone, the task is to arrange the numbers you have in order.

 

Play kids' favorite card game: UNO. That'll motivate children to learn to recognize numbers quickly.

Number Recognition Activities

Fishing Game

 

Chalk Number Recognition - Fun way to introduce number in Summer. This also helps their gross motor skills.

 

Number Tower - This not only helps recognition but also introduce to ordering.

 

 

Dice Rolling - This gives them another dimension to interpret numbers

 



 

Knock Down Numbers

 

 

Number Recognition Apps

 

 

 123 Ninja

 

 

Under Water Math Fun 

You can explore more of these type of activities in pinterest according to your kids favourite activity, cartoon or interest. Get them comfortable with number recognition, next week we shall explore how to make them match numbers.

Unwind #1 Ready for the Game plan?

Hurray!!!! This ("Unwind")is our series name to categorize all the blog-posts related to our evening 1 hour fun time :)

You thought I really took this long to decide? hehehe...Not at all!!!! I had kind of made my mind before I click the Publish bottom in my previous blog post. (For those of you who missed the first two scenes of the movie, you can go read here and then here. I hate to miss the first few scenes of the movie however bad it is. Its more like a deciding moment whether you want to stay glued to your seat for the next 1 or 2 hours :). Same here i guess!!!! Go read them however bad they are :) but do comeback once in a while because we are the process of improvisation.)

I am a working home. And my kid goes to kindergarten. We are physically parted by few kilometers and for few hours in the day.This makes our evening cuddling time more important than anything else. Its my de-stress mantra!!!! and my kiddo already has a masters in the art of hugging, kissing, and pleasing his mom :). So we need that 60 minutes of mommy-kiddo time. (mommy-kiddo time starts from evening till night but this particular hour of the day - mama doesn't do any chores and kiddo doesn't turn on any gadget)

And we slowly started finding ways to keep our feet grounded in one place, doing something that is interesting to both of us. Sometimes we sit and watch a cartoon movie together, sometimes we go out to bicycle, sometimes we sit do a puzzle or LEGO. But we slowly learnt by experience that when we repeat the same activity in near future it kind of becomes a routine, which both of us don't like. Yeah, we cant stick to patterns!!!!

That's when I started reading about, researching about, googling (Love this word!!!) about (which is more apt) teaching concepts to kids. I didn't want to teach him phonetics, cursive writing or mathematical tables. I left those to the experts. I felt these are easily(best) learnt by kids when they are taught in group and by those who are professionally trained to do this. Miss. Lexie is already doing a great job!!!!!

I took the concepts from Homeschooling websites and decided to follow unit studies. Unit studies are really fun and informative to these little hyper-active cognitive brains. It kind of caters to all their Ws and Hs. And we progress little in language, numbers, science and arts at the end of every unit study. 

We don't follow textbooks but of course we read a lot of storybooks related to the topic of our unit study. 

Then we  watch Rhymes (I think he is little too big for them now, but i still use them if I have to make him rote something) interesting videos, or cartoons related to our study subject. (To my surprise I found many of the kids storybook has read aloud with cartoon images by the authors themselves which makes the study time more fun for us). 

We do use iPad to play Apps related to our subject again. 

And a lot of coloring, tracing, drawing on papers. 

We make the place more messy by cutting, pasting, gluing, etc. We follow "Excuse Us!!!! This place is Messy as we are busy making memories" (Of course no excuse to mama who has to make the room as the tidiest corner of the home for next day's fun :( as part of her nightly clean routine ) 

I think you would have got the glimpse of what you can find in the upcoming blog posts. Yeah, Loads and Loads of Links and Creativity.

**PS: We don't make this strict everyday. We still go to park, bicycle when its sunny, take a bus to Library, go to Judo and Swimming, freak out on Friday evenings, We sometimes don't do anything productive on weekends. Like all these Unit Study time is just another activity :)

So how do we encapsulate all these memories and mess that we are creating?. Of course I click and record a lot when my boy is on his mission. Then I found this concept of Lap-booking. Trust me I am obsessed now. I really want to do one by myself for every unit study. But I forcefully take a back step and leave it to his imagination. I am sure you too will get hooked too!!!!

More gyan\info\facts about Unit Studies and Lap-booking as we really unwind more!!!!! Lets keep it simple to start the ball rolling. (and by that I get more time to find more about them...hehehehe)

I am for sure every mom will have a story to share on how they spend their cuddling time. How do you spend your evening family time?. My ears are all open!!!