Nature walk - Nature's architects

We had a great week and I wanted to share some of our interesting findings during our nature walk.  We found a piece of bee hive.  We investigated the perfect hexagon shapes in the bee hive. It’s really amazing how these small bees built their house using beeswax and how they built theses perfect hexagon shapes. 

I drew the beehive using rangoli powder and my little one’s attempt to draw a hexagon ends in a oval shape.

Another attempt

Here are the second tiny architects.  Found these busy weaver ants during our nature walk  Look at their nests. How beautifully they connected the leaves using saliva and built their houses.

Bayaa weavers are common in our farm land.

  But, I have been looking for a weaver bird’s nest. When I visited my professor at Nit, Trichy, his daughter showed me this weaver’s nest in their backyard. My professor’s wife is maintaining a great backyard and I am lucky to see this weaver’s nest there.  I clicked this for my little one.

We found these big caterpillars in our backyard.  There are so many.  We are waiting to see the pupae.

Found this guava seed in our nature walk.  Look. Isn't it look like a brain?  Taken it for our nature box.

 You can view all our nature study posts here

Teaching place values - tens and ones - Shopping game extended

We extended our shopping game to learn place values. This time I used only ten rupees and one rupee coins in our game (I introduced only the meaning of tens and ones).

Initially, when I asked my little one to pay Rs.12/- she put a one rupee coin and a 2 rupees coin side by side and said , “here is the money.”   I expected this and hence, I gave her only ten rupee notes and one rupee coins.  

Here are some pictures from our shopping game.

Cardboard Roll dolls

I have seen many toilet paper roll dolls in internet and was very much inspired by those projects.  So, I too wanted to do some recycled crafts and we made some cardboard dolls this week. These are really easy and fun to make.  

I used a base cardboard tube of thread rolls.Here is a step by step tutorial

Here is our cardboard tube Rapunzel

Our Math Story Board

In kindergarten, a child has to learn beyond counting and writing numbers and I want our math activities to be real and meaningful.  I already posted some of our math activities like egg counting, simple additionand subtraction with toys … 

In one fine evening, when we were in the terrace observing the babblers, I said, “They are always seen in groups of 6 to ten. That’s why it is also called as seven sisters"

My little one started counting it.  I said, “Actually there were 8 and 3 flew away”.  She immediately replied, “Then, there would be only 5.” I was surprised to hear it.   Because, my little one is very good in counting, shapes recognition and comparisons.  But she never shows interest in addition and subtraction.  In fact, if I ask her to add two numbers or if I give her some worksheet on addition/subtraction, her reply would be like, “No, I don’t like this sort of math.”   So I thought of trying a little later.  But, now I understood, she loves ‘real and meaningful’ math, not worksheets.

I started including science quizzes and simple math concepts in my own stories. I pinned the idea of creating a story board from carrotsareorange a long before.  I created our math story board yesterday.  I cut pictures from old textbooks, comics and magazines and pasted the pictures in a chart paper to create various scenes.   Here comes our story.

This is our little heroin Tinu. Her mom asked her to visit her grandparents.  Her mom asked her to pluck some vegetables and flowers from their vegetable garden and give it to her grandparents.  

On her way, Tinu stood some time near the pond, counted the ducks, fishes and the frog

(I asked my little one some questions like “5 ducks standing and 1 swimming. Totally how many ducks are there?

How many frogs would be there, if the eagle eats one frog?

if the crane eats two fishes, how many fishes would be there?”)

Then, she went to their vegetable garden.  In the entrance, there stood a big tree asked her to identify its name from the seed. Once she answered,  she was allowed inside. 

She compared tomato and brinjal plants which has more number of vegetables.  She plucked 3 from each plant (addition). 

Then, she counted the honey bees flying around the hibiscus plant.  She plucked 4 flowers (Subtraction to find the flowers in the plant).

  She saw one more brinjal plant and plucked two more brinjals (I asked her the total number of   brinjals in her hand).  While returning, she saw 4 parrots sitting in the tree.  3 more parrots came and sat. The tree asked her to tell the total number of parrots sitting in the branch.  She would be allowed  to leave the garden only if she answers . She added them up and replied 7.

On her way to her grandparents’ house, She compared a coconut tree and a papaya tree and said which one is taller.  Then she reached her grandparents’.  

This is my first submission for the challenge 'Something every week - a 90 day homeschoolers challenge"  

Introducing My little Artist

I love to do art and craft works and I always encourage my little one in such activities. These are some of our works with leaves, pencil shavings and other materials.  But, this time i want to display some of  the pencil sketches and other art works of my  little one  .

This is my personal favorite. Mom and Daughter

Sun and Star(drawn on the day we had ' space study')

A selfie

Dodo and a rabbit

Panda

Rose

 Mosquitoes!!!

 Horse!!!

Fairies

 Egg shell painting (Love those eyes) 

Sorting with Venn Diagram

It was not my idea to introduce Venn diagram now. But, it's just happened.

We used to play quizzes now and then.  One day our play turned like this,

“Can you name a water animal which is also a mammal?”

“”Can you name a water animal which is also an invertebrate?”

I placed few toys from our miniature unit and I asked my little one to sort the animals which can live both in land and water.

Then, I drew a Venn diagram and told her how to use it for sorting. She always loves sorting so finished it happily.

We continued our sorting like animals with spots and stripes, black or white animals ....

Bird Watching with kids

We have been spending our last few weeks on bird watching along with our regular schedules.  I've heard that April to September is the best season to watch birds. You can go for bird watching year round, but during these months you can collect nests and feathers too.

We are fortunate to have so many birds in our backyard and farmyard that include ring neck parrot, brown eagle, magpie robin, yellow billed babblers, wren, flower pecker, king fisher, wood pecker, Eurasian hoopoe, mynah,brahminy mynah and baya weavers.  Of course, these are the common birds of Indian Subcontinent.   In fact, one of the important things in bird watching is to identify the birds’ names and only now I came to know most of these names. My little one gave me a chance to know about birds. 

For the last few months I have been collecting the articles -‘love for birds’ that came along with the supplementary of ‘Dinakaran Tamil Daily’.  It helped me a lot to identify the bird’s name and  we used internet to extend our study on feathers and nests.

We collected nests and feathers during our walk. Whenever we get a new feather, we enjoyed a lot and we tried to identify the birds.  
                                                
                                                    investigating a feather(Kingfisher's)

We observed the birds, listened to them and tried to imitate their sounds.  We even noticed that some birds are walking and some are hopping. (I learnt that birds habitually perch in trees hop and birds those spend most of the time in ground for food walks).

Feathers collected( feathers of parrot, pigeon, king fisher, parrot, babbler, hoopoe, brown eagle and peacock)

Our Nest Collection- some cup shaped and some pendulum shaped.

Pictures of some of our backyard birds (taken by my brother)

Baya weaver

Mynah:

 Magpie robin:

Yellow billed Babblers:

When peafowls visited our backyard...