Beautiful Butterflies

We finished out our Bees and Butterflies unit this week by learning about different kinds of butterflies.  Miss M later told me her favorite is the Blue Morpho.  I love the way she says it. :)

I decided to do the storytelling activity a little differently than we often do; I gave each girl a butterfly, bee and flower and then let them tell me the story.  Our friend started it off, Miss M played off of hers and Littlest buzzed around them both, flapping like a butterfly.  They went back and forth, helping their insects find food and take it back home, for quite a while.  It was fun to watch and I wished I'd recorded it.

You can tell by the blur that they
were pretty into the music.

We made the butterfly wands, giving the girls free rein to decorate however they felt.  Littlest stuck mostly to stickers while the older girls did more drawing and approximated patterns more similar to an actual butterfly.  Instead of just using the music CD, we turned on our Dance N Beats DVD for this month and they danced with their butterfly props for a few songs before I brought them back in for another activity.

They loved the matching game.  I gave each girl a caterpillar and they had to find their matching butterfly.  Miss M remembered days later that she was the Peacock Butterfly.  I may need to make a few more cards to go with that game.

I think my favorite activity this month was the journal.  We were really good about making sure we stayed caught up and both of the older girls are really getting into writing and making up their own stories about the pictures they draw.  Littlest even kept at her journal for just as long as the big girls, even if she mostly just drew circles.  The journal is such a great way to practice a host of skills, including fine motor/writing, counting, language, shape and color identification, etc...This summer I plan to buy each girl a composition notebook and we are going to draw a picture every night after dinner about their favorite activity from the day.  It will be so fun to pull these out when they are older to see how much they've grown and to review the things that were important to them when they were little.

We played the Pollinate the Flowers number identification game as outlined in the Teachers Guide at first but after a while I adapted it to their attention span.  They got really excited when I started spinning the spinner and telling them which number they had to find and bring to me, although Miss M got upset at the end because she wasn't the one to find the last number.  She thought that meant she hadn't won the game.  I didn't even know she had a concept of win/lose because we don't play games that way yet.  It gave me the opportunity to talk to her about the purpose of the game and sportsmanship.  I'm not sure how much sunk in but we will find out the next time we try this game.

Pollinator BINGO was a blast and a great way to work on language skills. Instead of just showing the girls which butterfly or flower I had drawn for them to find on their cards, I described it (three pink flowers, a blue butterfly with dots).  They also had to look closely because some of them shared characteristics but were different (a great way to work on the concept of same/different).  Miss M would yell BINGO really loudly every time she got three in a row and informed me that she was calling the dog Bingo to come play with her butterflies.  BINGO games are super easy to make yourself with clipart or even just a couple sheets of stickers and you can use them to work on colors, numbers, sight words, alphabet skills or vocabulary.

I think one of the girls' favorite activities was the Giant Blue Morpho activity where they measured their hands and different objects to see if they could find something that was the same size as the butterfly.  I pulled out a measuring tape and secured it at the eight inch mark so they could use it themselves to measure the toys they found.

The postcards are always fun and this month Miss M decided to use it as a thank you card for a friend who had invited her over to play in his backyard a couple weeks ago.  She insisted on writing his name (with me telling her the letters) and then trying to copy the message I wrote on it for her.  She was very proud to hand it to his mom.

That was our month.  This was a really fun unit and I look forward to doing it again when the girls are older and expanding on some of the fun details we learned.

All About Butterflies

We have had a blast learning about the life cycle of butterflies this week.  We spent our first class learning about eggs and caterpillars and today we did chrysalises and butterflies.

We started off by introducing the concept that animals can come from eggs by hiding toy animals in Easter eggs for the girls to find and open.   I talked about how some of the animals we found came out of eggs (chicken, duck, frog and snake) but some of them (cow and pig) did not.  Then I reminded the girls of one of their favorite stories, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle (which we watched during snack later) and talked about how caterpillars are born from eggs.


I love the new draw and dictate sheets!!  They come with a story title and a prompt to get your child drawing and then you write down the story they come up with (I had the girls write their names by themselves).  These are fabulous and it sparked an idea for teaching the girls to start keeping daily journals.  Miss M's story reads as follows:

"Once upon a time an egg fell and a caterpillar came out.  It fell into a puddle and was so wet.  He sunk in the water and Jesus came and helped him.  He was happy."

The girls were very detailed with their drawings and content to do this activity for quite a while before we moved on to making the egg on a leaf craft.  Littlest loved dotting the glue on by herself and scattering the orzo "eggs" over it.

We read the caterpillar story included in our materials and the girls practiced their color identification and counting skills by finding the fruit that matched the details in the story.  We finished off our first day by making the cornstarch caterpillar sculptures.  I should have had them use a little more water to make them sticky because they kept falling apart.  The straws were also kind of difficult to poke into the noodles for the antennae and legs but toothpicks worked great.


For our second day of class, we talked about chrysalises and butterflies.  First, we reviewed the story "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" again and talked about how he makes a cocoon at the end of the book.  Then we did the number review activity from the Teacher Guide but I changed it just a little.  I gave them each their own cardboard tube and a length of tulle I had left over from a Halloween skirt project and taped one end to the tube.  We used one of the bigfoam dice we've collected from our teacher materials so they could practice counting and had them grape the tulle that many times around.  After a few times through, I realized that their tulle was really, really long and it was going to take forever to finish the activity so then we took turns wrapping our tulle completely and counting how many times it took to finish.

They then took turns getting wrapped in a big blanket and "emerging" from this soft cocoon to get an idea of what a butterfly goes through.  Everyone wanted multiple turns with this activity.

Next we talked about how butterfly wings are the symmetrical.  I made a game out of the activity by making a design on one side and having them copy it on the other side, then they got to design a wing and I had to repeat it.  It was fun and one I will pull out again when they need something to do.

The life cycle activity was so cool!!  I drew quadrants for all the girls but they cut out their labels and glued them on (I checked to make sure the order was correct) by themselves.  I had them draw their own leaves to put the bean "egg" on and they decorated the caterpillar beans themselves as well.  I drew the butterfly shape for them to color, decorate and add the bean bodies and helped them wrap the chrysalis bean so it would fit in the space.  I love how they turned out and I'm going to use it when we order caterpillars in a few weeks.

We finished off with our journals.  Miss M has started trying to write in the last few days and does an amazing job for being three years old.  I tell her what letter to write and she forms it pretty legibly on her own.

That's it for this week!

Sweet Bees

Daddy is out of town and so is our friend so this week was a little less structured as I just concentrated on surviving with the littles all by myself for the first time.

The honeybee and bumble bee lessons were really fun.  We started the honeybee lesson by talking about characteristics and practicing making ABCD patterns with our patterning blocks from the teacher materials for the month.  They enjoyed coming up with different groupings of blocks and talking about what was the same and what was different about them.  Not only was this a good pre-math activity but it was awesome for language development as well.  I had to help them choose to move on to another activity because they were having so much fun with this one.

We sang our opening song "Honeybee is feeling ______" next.  I think I sang it eight times as they buzzed around the room looking mad, glad and sad.  Even Littlest got in on the action, watching the bigger girls to see how they were expressing the emotion of the current verse.

We did a lot of journal entries today, to make sure we stay caught up.  For the hexagon entry, I used tape on the back of the pattern pieces to help keep them from sliding around as they traced them to make their own beehive picture.  I asked them to trace at least as many shapes as they were years old.  Littlest followed along but mostly drew circles around the shape on her paper.  For the 15 journal page, I had them stamp their fingerprints fifteen times using yellow ink, then they turned them into bees and we wrote a sentence about what the fifteen bees were doing.

We learned about how bees suck up nectar; I think this was Littlest's favorite activity because she got to play with lots of water.  I am proud of myself for giving them bowls of water to transfer back and for with various items and I let them make a mess without immediately wiping it up.  I'm realizing how very important it is to let kids experiment and I'm forcing myself to relax and let it be.  The art portion of the activity was really fun, although Miss M wouldn't let me trace her closed hand for the hive, she wanted a full handprint and demanded a new paper when I tried to explain it.  I took a deep breath and let her do it her way.  Littlest loved squirting the (too) watery paint on the paper and would have been totally happy to do that for at least half an hour.

Miss M loved the Bumble Bee project.  I folded the black paper to give her guides to practice cutting on.  We used the cut outs from the middle of the letter as the wings and she asked me to trim her stripes but otherwise she did it herself.  Littlest practiced holding the scissors (she's at least letting me show her how to put her hand in them, although she refuses to let me  help her actually cut) and glued together all the little leftover pieces (adding some googly eyes) to make her own little project.  They are both currently on the refrigerator, awaiting Daddy's praise when he finally gets home.

The Teachers Guide gives an activity for introducing this month's I Can Read book.  I changed it up a little to make a game.  We have a ton of Duplo blocks, including flowers.  I set out several of the flowers on the rug and gave Miss M a basket of blocks.  I had her start at our beloved circus tent and told her it was her "hive".  We talked about how scout bees find flowers and tell the other bees about it.  The game was to make a path to the flowers with the blocks, using one block for each step it took to reach the flower, then we would count how many steps to get all the flowers.  Of course, she added her own stipulations (you had to pretend to drink the nectar from the flowers and skip instead of walk).  She had a great time with it; so much so, that we didn't actually make it to reading the book before dinner.

I'm excited to get into butterflies next week; if I'd been more on the ball I would have ordered caterpillars so they'd be here in time but maybe I'll use this as a good introductory period and we will wait just a little longer to hatch our own butterflies.  It still gets pretty cold here and I'm not sure they would do well yet.

Bees and Butterflies

We started our new theme today, Bees and Butterflies!  I chose to do activities from the first two days, Homes and Food.

After looking at the topic poster and discussing the different kinds of homes bees can live in, we did the beehive stamping craft.  It can be hard for the girls to use objects that don't really have a handle on them for stamping, like the bubble wrap squares provided, so I took a piece of tape and rolled it around their finger (sticky side out) and attached the bubble wrap to it (bubble side out).  That seemed to work really well for all through of them.  I let the girls pick their paint color and stamp away.  Instead of making them stand up, I taped a piece of yarn to the back of one and used a rolled piece of tape to connect both hive halves, near the top.  The hive opens a bit so they can pretend to fly their bees in and out and we can hang them up rather than have them sitting on a counter.

They even added the flower stamens
so the bees had pollen to collect.

Next we played with our shape of the month (hexagon).  I showed them the wall shape, we counted the sides and talked about how hex means six.  I pointed out the shape of the cells on the topic poster as well.  I gave them black strips of paper to play with to see if they could make their own and then, because they were so interested in the Butterfly part of our monthly theme, I showed them how to trace hexagons onto paper to make a butterfly.  A tip for tracing shapes:  use a piece of rolled tape to attach the shapes to the paper so they don't move while your child traces.  Both big girls decided to draw a flower and attach bees on the other side of the paper and all three wanted their creations hung on the wall.  I think I might need to invest in a wire and clip art system to save my paint.

Fill the Honeycomb was a fun game and a good chance for Littlest to practice touching with one to one correspondence and take turns.  She was in charge of giving the die to the correct person, which she loved.  The girls did very well with this game since they are pretty good at counting.  When we had emptied their flower cards, we counted how many cells were still empty on the honeycomb and filled the rest of them in with our extra circles.

The nectar game was a fantastic fine motor activity that my girls absolutely loved and did for close to ten minutes.  They only stopped because we transferred all the water to the ice cube tray.  Littlest adores anything to do with playing in the water and Miss M liked the gradations in color from having varying amounts of water in each compartment (I added food coloring for fun).  It did take quite a bit of hand over hand guidance to help them get the hang of squeeze, release, squeeze with the included syringes.  Littlest kept trying to scoop and accidentally sucking up the water she had just squeezed into the tray.  I can see us doing this one a lot and adding some color mixing fun as well.

Lastly we started our journals.  Miss M informed me that her self-portrait is her when she used to be a sad bee.  When asked why she was sad, she said it was because she couldn't find a pink flower to drink from.  I love her imagination.  She drew her first initial by herself under the picture and I helped her with the rest of the letters.  That's it for today!