I am crappy at planning things to teach to our kiddos way in advance. I usually just browsed through the workbooks softcopies on my laptop and see what interests me at that point and then print out the worksheets related to the topics or googled for the worksheets online. So happened that the topic I decided to teach our kiddos is PLANT.
At first I thought, I have to teach both of them together. Even though their age gap differs (4.5 and 7, I left our 2.5 years old girl play with her toys happily) I told myself I have to make it works for both our older kiddos. By hook or by crook I'm not going to repeat this topic again and again lol.
So I got our kiddos to sit on the floor facing the whiteboard while I started gathering up my thoughts on how I should approach this topic so that they both can understand at their respective ages. Yes, I think my brains works very well under pressure and critical time limit lol.
I started with explaining to them what is a plant. It is a living thing, just like the animals and us humans. It 'eats', 'drinks', breathe and grows just like any other living thing. Then I drew some examples of plants such as grass, plants with flowers and a tree.
I proceeded to explain to them the parts of the plants. Roots, stems, leaves, flowers, trunk, branches etc. What each parts does to the plant. I compared my body to the plants with flowers and also to the tree.
Pretending that I'm a plant with flowers, I asked them where should my roots be and waited for our kiddos to point to my feet. I repeated the similar questions for leaves and flowers and stem. And moved on to pretending I'm a tree and repeated the same questions, where should my roots, branches, trunk etc be if I am a tree.
After the explanation, I proceeded to hand them 2 worksheets related to the topic I have just explained. Now, our 4.5 years old girl is not reading anything yet but she can do her copywork decently, meaning if you give her any words and asked her to copy out the word, she can do it no problem. I didn't need to explain what to do to our 7 years old boy since he can read the instructions, so I focused on our 4.5 years old girl.
I read out the name of the parts of the plant and asked her where should the parts be. Once she pointed to the right part, I told her to copy out the respective words next to the part. She did so diligently and patiently. At the same time she practises her copywork and writing skills, I also get to observe her understanding of the lesson I just taught them. Whether she captures what I said and remembered anything.
(** Left by our 4.5 years old girl, right by our 7 years old boy)
I repeated the same method with the second worksheet. But this time, instead of her writing down the answers, I told her 'This word is circle means 'roots', now draw a line to match to where the roots are.' She happily matches the line to the parts and completed both worksheets.
(** Left by our 4.5 years old girl, right by our 7 years old boy)
I'm loving moments like this where both kiddos can learn together!
Win-win!
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