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.