B4FIAR: Ask Mr. Bear

A few weeks ago, we rowed Ask Mr Bear and pull out a Farm Animals themed as well. My son loves this book to pieces and he can almost memorize it.  There were times I can here him do a monologue using his animal figures (Safari Toobs) basing on the story.  

Here are some pictures that best describes the activities we did to go along with the book.

Story sequencing. To make it more interesting I added the objects the animals offered to Danny as a gift for his Mom.  This printable was downloaded from Homeschool Creations.

Identifying beginning sounds using the printable pack which I downloaded as mentioned previously.

Where’s the Birthday Cake game which has the same mechanism as Where’s the Easter Card game.   Another favorite math game!

 

Oh and this is exactly the reason why I seldom have time to post.  This is out of topic, but we really really love playing outdoors.

Animal farm family matching game.  The cards can be downloaded here.  Well this is just my version, I made this because I was inspired by My Montessori Moments who has a COMPLETE set of animal families for download.   

Lastly, we sort zoo and farm animals. 

I am looking forward of rowing this again, and hopefully by then I have enough idea, resources and time to carry out additional activities.

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The Moon

Here’s the Moon unit we did for the past few days to go along with our Goodnight Moon Before FIAR. 

Read books which I borrowed a few books from the library aside from the ones we already have.

My son can now appreciate space facts, astronauts, rocket ships and planets.  Unlike the first time we had the moon unit.

    

The space toob which was a gift for him was very useful during his play pretend of space and planets.

Now on serious stuff, I discussed the the position of the moon, earth and sun in space.  

Then I talked about the moon revolving around the earth and that the earth revolves around the sun.  I demonstrated this using our felt planets and he was fascinated.  He tried doing it by himself.

Then we worked on the phases of the moon.  I was very careful telling him that there’s only one moon but it looks different from time to time.  Since this topic is a bit complicated for a 3 year old, I just compared to it making faces.  Sometimes we look sad, happy or mad but we only have one face.  And with this, he started making faces as well... just funny that he was able to get the point somehow.

Here he worked on the nomenclature cards of the phases of the moon.

 

And using felt moons, we talked about the moon getting bigger and getting smaller.

 

I made him worked through the phases by positioning the moon phases as to the ones on the book.  From here, I asked him on what side does the moon gets bigger or smaller.

 

So everytime we’re outdoors, and he would see the moon, I love that he would describe it to me as “it’s a gibbous moon” or “it’s a crescent moon”... not just “ a moon”.    As a mom, it really makes you happy that your child digest what you have taught them :)

 

Over the weekend, we made a hanging moon phases and placed it on our verandah.  I cut out the shapes of the phases and my son covered it with kitchen foil.

    

Here they are... the phases of the moon all in silver!

Then I put it all together and hanged them for us to look at each night :)  The camera though cannot do justice on how good it looked during the day, especially when the sun would shine on it... it sparkles!

 

And the silhouette looks lovely too! 

 

I hope you enjoyed reading  my post.  These days, I really don’t have the luxury of time to make an update so I just try to post as much photos to describe what we did.  Till next time!

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Before FIAR: Goodnight Moon

We’ve been doing this unit for sometime now because this book is one of my son’s favorite  and he loves the activities that we do to go along with it.  Since we spent most of our afternoon outdoors, I seldom have the time to write about our updates.  To cut my rant short, this has been a week-long overdue and I just have to post it so I can brush it off my mind.  Here are the activities we did for Goodnight Moon (B4FIAR):

Identifying the things that we see inside the little bunny’s room.  I got this printables from Homeschool Share.

As we read along the book, he would take the pictures from the left and matched it to the object in the book.

And here, he went inside his room to identify the things that we can see there, just like the book. 

We worked on the printables that I got from Homeschool Creations.  This is the Read,Write and Spell... and instead of forming the words using magnetic letters like we used to, this time I had him write it on a paper to practice writing skills. 

Identifying beginning letter using clip cards and shadow matching.                                                                                                              

     


Again, practicing writing skills.

We also read read the book Hey Diddle Diddle which I got from the library.  And made these stick puppets as we  recite the rhyme. Read about the whole activity here. 

For  math, we learned about clock faces and time :) Here’s my post for this. 

We also had number cards and counters.

For science, we studied the phases of the moon.  Will provide a separate post on it this weekend.

And that’s all what we had for Goodnight Moon Before FIAR.  I hope you can pick some ideas here to help you with your Before FIAR as well.  Happy weekend!

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Hey Diddle Diddle Stick Puppets

Sharing with you our activities to go along with Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme.  Actually, this is just part of our Before FIAR Goodnight Moon unit study.  We completed this today and my son loved it to bits!  So I might as well share it...

After reading the book for days (until my son can read them independently LOL), I started by collecting images from Google and printed it on a cardstock.  The characters I printed were:  the fiddler cat, dog, moon, jumping cow and the dish with the spoon.  Once ready I had Mavi color them.  I made him choose whatever color he wants.  He was so delighted to color the characters in the nursery!

The dish with the spoon is his favorite.  He tells me that the dish looks like Daddy and the spoon is Mommy. I love it that he associates me and his Dad to two objects holding hands :)

I cut each of the characters. 

Then I made him help me attach each on a popsicle stick using a sticky tape. 

And we started reciting the rhyme using these puppets! Oh aren’t they the cutest?

 

And then here’s another version wherein I made them stand using egg carton box so we can do some theatrics with out puppets. 

For reading comprehension and inference, I have my son answer these questions as we go along with the rhyme:

1. Who jumped over the moon?
2. Why do you think the cow jumped over the moon?
3. What instrument did the cat play
4. What kind of music do you think he was playing?  or What do you think his favorite song was?
5. Who laughed in the rhyme?
6. Why do you think the dog was laughing?
7. Who did the spoon run away with?
8. Why do you think they ran away together?

Some of these questions were really tough especially for a 3 year old, but it was funny to hear his answers.  And would you believe, I end up being asked as well. 

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