Win a multi-sensory farm animal set with Different is Good

Natalia is a home school mom, who, although now resides in South Africa, has a global perspective of being born in Chile, educated in Switzerland and having worked in the UK as a scientist. She has put together some amazing sets that will educate as well as interest your child, and Nicky and I were lucky enough to explore them. SA Mom blogs is giving away a Farm Animal set today on the blog.

The Montessori approach is something that Natalia also subscribes to, which, as you know, I was intrigued about because that is my educational background. Montessori has a whole section on Sensory activities, and not just the normal sight/ sound/ taste/ smell/ touch but a range of other ones, such as weight,visual and muscle discrimination (sequencing biggest to smallest) and feeling objects (stereognostic sense). I’m thinking that this would be a cool extension of the farm animals set – to place them in a bag and allow the child to feel and guess which animal it was. (Indeed Natalia was thinking ahead of me on this one and has some upcoming product lines utilising just this sense).

Children learn by doing and matching figurines to pictures is an excellent way to match the concrete with the abstract.

She also has audio files of all the animals making sounds. This is great for a matching exercise again, this time using the sound sense.  She also has an “animal challenge” sound file where questions are asked about the animal, giving their sounds as clues. I’m sure this task was no mean feat as she has the audio files in seven languages (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, German, Spanish and French).

Apart from matching, some other cool things about this set are:

• Matching the animals to their silhouette (another abstract concept)

• Identifying animals from just one body part (reasoning, problem solving)

• Identifying patterns
• Selecting the odd one out
• A further card of each animal building vocabulary which consists of:
  • Names of the female, male and offspring of each animal
  • Habitat of the animal
  • Produce from the animal
  • Interesting facts about the animal

Farm animals are basic concepts and children love to make the noises of the animals. I especially like these cards because they are a vocabulary lesson as well.

Another extension which I just could not help myself and make for this animal set is the phonetic animal farm. This is such a cool exercise because you also give them some incidental learning about nouns, verbs, adjectives and articles. I made these flashcards (thephoneticfarm) and got Nicky to match the animals. Then we had to work out which adjectives and verbs suited each animal best.

There is a recent addition to the website and they are the very popular dinosaurs. These are also to be matched to cards. These are slightly more tricky than the farm animals (which can be used on a two year old and up, although I would watch on the small objects in the mouth factor) and are recommended for three years and up. You have to really look at the dinos properly in order to match them.

This set involves sorting and categorising:

• Herbivores vs Carnivores

• Habitat: (Semi-arid, estuaries, forests, swamps)
• Continent: (Africa, Eurasia,South America and North America)

• Era: (Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic) (love the “bang!”mass extinction explosion on this card!)

Interesting facts about the dinosaurs are on the back of each card and there is also some info on the paleontologists who study them.

Similarly to the farm set, there’s a matching exercise but instead of silhouettes there are bones. There are also some other problem solving activities like finding the missing part of dino’s foot or finding objects in a museum.

 

I highly recommend these activities and especially with being at home they will bring some joy to the kids with a bit of cabin fever. The products are also very well made. Check out the website: Different is Good.

Disclaimer: we were provided with the farm animal set for review. 

If you’d like to win a farm set, comment on the post below.

 

Terms and Conditions:

1. This competition will run for a week. The winner will be announced on the Facebook page, and emailed.
2. This competition is open to South African residents only.
3. The prize is not transferable.
4. If you have won on SA Mom Blogs in the past 3 months you will not be eligible to win this competition.
5. If you win the same prize on another site then you forfeit this one.

 

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