Butterfly Nomenclature Cards – free printable

I made this set of butterfly nomenclature cards for M to put together as part of our mini butterfly unit (which I’ll be posting about next week).  It was hard to find something - for free - like this, so I’m hoping some of you will find these useful too.

Unfortunately, with the drawing I was working with, there wasn’t a good way to show the proboscis (butterfly tongue), or the legs on these cards.  And it just seemed strange to have two of the cards show side views while the others show the top view.  M knew about the proboscis because we actually got to see our  butterflies unrolling theirs and sipping nectar through them; we saw their very delicate jointed legs also.  I may still add those two cards in – if anyone would like them included, or as an add-on set for this one, let me know in the comments, and I’ll make them available.

parts of a butterfly

The parts of a butterfly that these cards cover are: antennae, head, compound eye, thorax, abdomen, forewing, hindwing, and one card for the full butterfly.

To use these Montessori-style, print two sets and cut the cards apart.  Leave the pictures and labels together on one set, and separate them on the other set.  The child takes the picture-with-label cards and lays them out in a row, then matches up the separate pictures and labels cards.  It’s a good way to learn new vocabulary, and begin associating printed words with the pictures.

Enjoy!  And remember, these are for your personal use only; you are welcome to write about them on your blog, but please link back to this post!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Flower Nomenclature Cards (free printable)

I recently made some 3-part flower nomenclature cards for M.  These are very simple, and label only the stem, petals and parts on the inside of a bloom.  I’ve made two cards with the petals highlighted; one is labeled “petals”, and the other is labeled “corolla”, in case you want to be scientific. :)  Personally, we use “petals”.  You can find other sets online that label the leaves and sepals (the little green cup that encases the petals, then cups the bloom”), and other parts too.

But these are free.  Heh. ;)

M just loves 3-part cards – what is it about them?  I really don’t know, but they definitely appeal to him, and he enjoys working with a new set as soon as I have them done.

You can download this set by clicking on the image below: 

Please remember these are for your personal use (classroom or homeschool) only.  You are welcome to link to this post, but please do not offer this printable on your website.

Enjoy!! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Math Progress

I wanted to do so many fun things with math this year – measuring, weighing, learning about volume… but we’ve been pretty much focused on counting as well as simple addition and subtraction.  (M does have a tape measure and loves to “measure” things in his own way, haha – but we haven’t done anything along those lines together in some time.)

He’s interested in counting as much as he can, and he is always trying to think of the “highest number possible”. ;)  Infinity is a bit beyond his grasp at this point, I think. ;)  So, following his interest, we’ve been counting.  And counting.  And counting some more. ;)  There is plenty of time to worry about all that other stuff!

He loves this hundreds chart I made for him: As you can see, it begins with 0 and ends with 99.  It just made more sense to both of us to have each row of numbers begin with 10, 20, 30, etc.  M loves to count these out, just moving his finger along.  When he gets to the end, he flips it over and  yells:

This is laminated, and we’ve played around with it a bit, finding certain numbers and coloring them in with a dry erase marker, to make designs:

There are many printable hundreds charts that you can find online; if you want to use ours, it’s available here (this one uses red for odd numbers and blue for even numbers).

I found this fantastic dot-to-dot book on Amazon:

Each picture goes to 100, and M LOVES these.  The pages are printed on high quality paper (not newsprint!), and perforated.  This is, without doubt, the best dot-to-dot book I’ve seen – if your child is ready to count, or learn to count, to 100.  We do several each week.  M would do several each day, if I’d let him!  It has been a great way to practice number order and number recognition!

 

And we’ve been playing lots of games – M’s new favorite is War:This has been good for practicing number value and “more or less”; and it’s just good fun. :)  We also play a lot of UNO, mancala, Chutes and Ladders, and Slap Jack. :)

Oh how I love being able to stay at home with my sweet boy, taking things slow and just having fun together!  It is such a privilege and a blessing to watch him learn and grow!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Flower 3-part cards – free printable

I made some flower cards for M, and am happy to be able to share them with all of you!

To use as Montessori-style 3-part cards, you’ll need to print 2 sets.  Keep one set whole, and divide the other set into photos and labels.  Have your child match the photos and the labels to the first set.

These are flowers M will see this spring and summer in our yard.  I love flowers, and spent a good couple of years researching and planning flower gardens for our home after we were married.  Since having M I haven’t kept them up as well as I had hoped. :)  That happens when your life gets turned upside down by a little person, doesn’t it?!

There are a total of 24 cards in this packet.  Eventually I hope to teach M to sort them into flowers that come from bulbs, rhizomes, bushes, or seed, etc.  You’ll see there are a few of each kind.  Please feel free to ask any questions! :)  Click on the image below to access the download.

These cards are for your personal use only.  Please feel free to link to this post, but do not post this printable directly on your website.  Thank you!

 

Linking to: 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Learning by Heart – I See the Moon

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

{M is 4 1/2 years old}

      M is in love with the moon.

It all began with If You Decide To Go To The Moon , by Faith McNulty: I heard about this book from Natalie over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns, and thought M would like it.  Well, he did.  He couldn’t get enough of it and was instantly fascinated with outer space in general, and the moon in particular.  We have previously read books about outer space and the moon, but none of them sparked his interest as well as this one.

So we began a very simple little moon unit. 

We watched the launch of the space shuttle Discovery in February (yes, this is a pretty late post) live on the laptop:It was thrilling, to say the least.  He talked about it for days afterward.  I couldn’t quite get him to understand that they weren’t going to the moon, but oh well. :)  He loved learning about how everything is weightless in space and how the astronauts can float around inside of the space shuttle.  He wanted to get into the nitty-gritty details of how they live in it, especially how they go to the bathroom.  sigh.  It’s all part of learning, right? ;)

We played games with some beautiful space flashcards I picked up from Target over a year ago.I was smart enough to get two sets at the time, although I wasn’t smart enough to think of a way to use them.  But once M’s interest in all things outer space was in high gear, I remembered this post of Ticia’s, where she created a game for her kids using these same flashcards.  Click on the link to her post to get the specific details.  This was fun and as soon as one of us had a card covered we flipped it over and read all of the interesting information on the back.  I think it would’ve gone a bit more quickly if we’d had more than just 2 players though, or if I had separated the flashcards into smaller groups.

We learned a bit about the phases of the moon too. 

We watched this video:

  

We looked at this page of the Starchild website a bit:The website is part of NASA, and has tons of interesting things for children to learn about.  I highly recommend taking a look!  We only went over the moon phases web page, but I think we’ll be back to learn more!

I made some moon phases Montessori-style 3-part cards.  I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted online (for free anyway), so I used a public domain photo of the moon, and edited it to show the various phases:  

We had an art project waiting for us as M matched up these cards and labels, and I felt like he was hurrying through it to get to something more fun.  However, he has since talked about the “gibbous” moon on his own, so I guess some of it stuck! :)

You can download and print the Moon Phases 3-Part Cards here:

M had fun making a little outerspace artwork.  We used black paper, green and blue chalk dipped in water, aluminum foil, scissors, sequins, silver glitter glue, and two circle-shaped lids:
I showed M how to hold a lid and draw around it at the same time in order to draw a circle.  He cut one circle from foil for the moon, and one was drawn onto the black paper with chalk.  He drew some areas of land on his “earth circle” and then colored it in with wet chalk (wet chalk on black paper is fun, and a good art project all on its own).

He drew a face on his moon, then sparkled up the the rest of outer space with some sequin and glitter glue stars: 

On a trip to visit my parents, we were lucky enough to find this amazing book in a box my mom wanted me to look through:I’m not sure if or where it can be found, but it is truly amazing. :)  It is filled with facts, and after reading it, you can unfold the pages:Open it up:And you have a 4-foot long space shuttle model!  M was in space shuttle heaven. :)  There’s a lot of great details, like a satellite in the cargo area:And a pull-out section showing the control panels and the area the astronauts live in:(sorry that picture didn’t turn out so well!)

There were several other moon-related books we read; here are M’s favorites…

The Moon, by Seymour Simon: This is long, but packed with information.  M wanted to read this one several times a day for two weeks straight.

I Took the Moon for a Walk, by Carolyn Curtis and Alison Jay:

Moondance, by Frank Asch:

Happy Birthday, Moon, by Frank Asch:

  (M loves all the Moonbear books by Asch!)

The Berenstain Bears on the Moon, by Jan and Stan Berenstain:

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner, and Weekly Wrap-Up, as well as Science Sunday!  Be sure to check them all out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

More Play Dough Number Mats – 11 to 20 – free printable!

There was such a great response to the autumn-themed play dough mats for numbers 1 to 10, that I decided to make some more. :)  These are for numbers 11 to 20, and have no theme.  I was trying to do this quickly, on little sleep, with a bad case of mommy-brain, so I just used cute clip art that I knew would appeal to M (and hopefully other children!).  We are currently working on numeral recognition of 11 to 20, and counting to 20 correctly; these have been a great help (who doesn’t love play dough?).

Print and laminate the pages, or just pop them into some page protectors like we did.  Then make play dough “snakes” to form the numerals, then play dough balls to place on each circle while counting.

We also used them for colored water dropping:
Play dough mats are good for fine motor skill work, as well as one to one correspondence practice and numeral formation.  You can download them here:Playdough Number Mats 11-20
  I hope you enjoy them!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Our Thankfulness Tree

Last year we began a very sweet tradition – during the 7 days before Thanksgiving we each write (well, M dictates) one thing we are thankful for on a paper leaf every evening. 

We talk about the things for which we are thankful during our dinner, then afterwards we pin the leaves to our felt tree.  By the time Thanksgiving rolls around our tree is looking beautiful and festive, and we are in a thankful frame of mind.

Thanksgiving is a hard time for me – several years ago, when we were wanting a baby so very badly, I found out I was pregnant on Thanksgiving morning.  It was also the 10 year anniversary of our first date.  It began as a wonderful, wonderful day.  But unfortunately the day ended in a traumatic fashion in the emergency room with almost no hope of a viable pregnancy (although hope is exactly what I held onto).  After the long weekend I went to my doctor for a follow up exam and found that I had, in fact, lost the baby.  I still miss that baby.  I still love that baby.  I am still thankful for that baby and the other babies we had for such a short time, and I’m especially thankful for the baby we were able to hold onto, who now makes Thanksgiving a little bit brighter again. :) 

{Remember, please, that holidays are not easy and happy times for everyone, and make sure to count all your blessings!}

Our leaves for this year, cut from fall-themed scrapbook paper:Really, don’t they resemble little mice lying on the floor?

Our felt tree, tacked onto the flannelboard and ready to go:

This was cut from a pattern I drew and enlarged; if you are interested, you can download the felt tree pattern here.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Floor Number Game – free printables!

 

I’m having a blast coming up with fun math games and activities to do with M.   I’m almost glad he didn’t take an interest in the bead bars and number boards (although, honestly, I do hope that he will, eventually!).

For our Floor Number Line Game I printed out some large number cards, 1 – 20, and laminated them.   I also made two dice – one has numbers on it, and one has actions on it. 

Here is the number die:

The action die looks like this:

To play, we scatter the numbers around our floor, while still keeping them in order.  So #1 goes nearest the starting place, and number 20 goes the farthest away.  You want enough room between numbers to have space for doing the actions.  It’s hard to crawl from #1 to #2 if there’s only a few inches between them. ;)

Each player starts at number 1, and the first player tosses both dice.  If you get “+2” and “hop on one foot”, you would hop on one foot forward two spaces to the number 3 card (forward means towards the higher numbers. Depending on how you have the numbers laid out, it could actually be sideways).

The number die has a zero on it, which means stay where you are; and some numbers have a minus sign (-), which means go back towards one. 

Whoever reaches 20 first is the winner!  When we first played this we only used numbers 1 to 10 and that was a lot of fun too!

If you have more than one child, this is a great game, as you can retrieve the dice for them.  If you only have one child and you are playing with him or her, it’s still a great game, but whoever is retrieving the dice for each turn will need to remember his or her spot on the number line!  This could also just be a fun activity for one child, without being a competitive game at all.

The floor cards are made to be printed on colored paper, and so don’t appear in order on the printable (I didn’t want 1 through 4 to all be purple, and so on, so I mixed the numbers up a bit).  You can download the game materials below.

Floor Number Game

Have a beautiful day! :)

Advent 2010 – Printable Ornaments and Prayers

***NOTE*** THIS POST WAS WRITTEN FOR ADVENT OF 2010.  FOR A CURRENT JESSE TREE FILE (2011), PLEASE SEE THIS POST.

November is here!  While we are getting ready for Thanksgiving, it’s a great time to remember that Advent is just around the corner!

A photo of our Jesse Tree last year.
Apparently it’s fun to place ornaments in the “sky” too! ;)

Last year I wrote a bit about what a Jesse Tree is and how we use it in our observance of Advent each year.  You can read that post here.  I can’t say enough wonderful things about how using a Jesse Tree has added a sense of hope, expectation, focus, and peace to our home during Advent.  It is one of those things that “work” even better than I had first hoped.  I find myself wanting to share this with everyone I know and am always encouraging other families to adopt the Jesse Tree as an annual tradition in their homes.

The Jesse Tree is a way of seeing God’s love for us and His plan for salvation as shown throughout history.  It is basically one Bible story per night, beginning with creation and ending with the birth of Jesus – a way of waiting and hoping for Christmas, and really living Advent by focusing our hearts on what Christmas is truly all about. 

Each Bible story is accompanied by a symbol taken from the story which is made into an ornament for the Jesse Tree.   Each evening the Bible story is read (directly from Scripture, or for younger children you may want to use a Children’s Bible), and the ornament for the day is placed on the tree. 

The name “Jesse Tree” comes from Isaiah, chapter 11, which says:

“But a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, A spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD. Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide, But he shall judge the poor with justice, and decide aright for the land's afflicted. He shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. Justice shall be the band around his waist, and faithfulness a belt upon his hips. Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox. The baby shall play by the cobra's den, and the child lay his hand on the adder's lair.” – verses 1-8

Many people use a large branch placed in a pot of dirt to hang their ornaments on.  Some use a miniature artificial Christmas tree.  We use a simple felt Christmas tree, tacked onto our flannelboard.  Our ornaments are made from felt also (decorated with markers and glitter glue).

In the attached printable below, I’ve included the ornaments that we use.  If these do not appeal to you there are numerous others you can find by doing a simple Google search.  I chose these for their simplicity – young children can color or paint them, or they can be used as a design for felt ornaments like our family has done.  (Some of these were designed by myself, and as far as I can tell the others are all public domain images.)

I’ve also included the prayer cards that I made for our family, with the Scripture reference for the day printed on it, the ornament of the day, and a short prayer.  There is also a simple word or phrase to meditate on for each day, which oftentimes leads to a nice family discussion about the beauties of our faith.

To simplify things a bit, many families begin their Jesse Tree on Dec. 1st and finish on Dec. 24th, and therefore have the same ornaments and Bible stories on the same days every year.  We do things a bit differently, and try to begin our Jesse Tree on the actual first day of Advent.  Since this date varies from year to year, the number of ornaments and the order of Bible stories changes a bit.   I’ve included a schedule of dates, ornaments, and readings specific to this year’s Advent season.  (If you want to do this, and have any questions, please feel free to email me or leave a comment with your specific question.  I’ll do my best to give you a good answer!)

2010 Jesse Tree Packet:
We also have a little felt Jesus doll and a “manger” (for a tutorial, see here).  M puts a piece of yarn “hay” in the manger each evening as we end our Jesse Tree time, and we say simply, “Come Baby Jesus, be born in our hearts.”  On Christmas Eve he places the felt baby Jesus in the manger on his soft bed of hay.  So sweet.

It’s a beautiful and meaningful tradition, and if you haven’t done a Jesse Tree in the past, I hope you’ll try it this Advent!  If you have had a Jesse Tree in the past, leave a comment and let us know the impact it had on your family’s Advent!

I am linking this post up to Kylie's blog:


Have a beautiful day! :)