Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Bee Food

On Day 2 of Bees and Butterflies with Mother Goose Time we learned about Bee Food.  The two main activities we did with the older boys (7&5) was Transfer Nectar and Fill the Honeycomb.

First up was Fill the Honeycomb.  Mother Goose Time (MGT) provided us with this big beautiful honeycomb poster.  Each circle on the honeycomb was the exact size of an orange BINGO chip which they also gave us a big bag of.
We were also given a bright sheet of flowers with the numbers 1 through 16 on them.  First the boys put pollen/nectar/BINGO chips on each flower.  Then they would roll the die and remove that many chips off of the flowers and bring them to the honeycomb.
Placing the chips in the center of each circle.
Adam enjoyed chewing on the rubber droppers.  Lachlan was getting his flower board ready.
The honeycomb slowly got filled as we talked about the shape of the cells in a honeycomb and what and how they fill them.  Lots of concentration was required for this task as you can see by Lachlan's thinking tongue.

 Peter's turn.  He rolled a six, so he took 6 chips off of the flowers and put them on the honeycomb.  Then he would replace the missing chips on the flower board when he was done to get ready for his next turn.
I tried to show Adam how to place the chips in the center of the flower.  He chose to draw on his flower card.  I had an extra so I didn't mind.  All drawing is good at this age. 
 Apparently he can write with both hands, which I believe is common at this age. 
 I still had Adam's name tag from the previous day so I wrote his name on it with a purple marker.  As I wrote I said the names of each letter. 
He made marks along with me.  Then I let him freely write on his name tag. 
 I guess he got tired and needed a rest.
While Adam and I worked Lachlan and Peter continued to fill the honeycomb.  With just two kids working on it, it took quite a while.  I was so impressed with their perseverance.  At one point they were ready to give up but I reminded them of the "busy as a bee" saying and how hard bees work.  They chose to keep going. 


It's getting closer!!!
Lachlan took the last turn.
 He was quite proud to fill the last honeycomb. 
Next we did the Transfer the Nectar activity.  We first discussed how we carry our food and then talked about how bees carry their food.  They don't have hands, so how do they bring nectar back to the hive?  It turns out they have 2 stomachs, one is called their honey stomach and hold the nectar until they get back to the hive.

MGT had us set out a bowl of water, an ice cube tray and water droppers.  Peter worked hard at transferring the "nectar" from bowl (flower) to hive (ice cube tray).  Again, he had to work hard to get the job done.





I also prepped a lesson from the Little Goose guide for Adam.  It was their recommended "Tray Play" for the day called Bee on a Flower.  They recommended cutting out a flower from different colored paper and cutting out a square of that some color to put on a colored cube.  That way the little one could roll the cube and then set the wooden bee bead on that colored flower.

I cheated a bit by drawing colored flowers on a white piece of paper.  I told Adam to put the bee on which ever color flower and then pointed to that flower and said it's color again.  This worked, but it did take away the matching element of the game.
We did talk a lot about hexagons on this day as well since the honeycomb is made up of a bunch of hexagons.  Since it was a beautiful day outside I set up another tray of the fill the honeycomb activity outside.  The fish bowl thing we have happened to be a hexagon which was cool.
We got a few of the manipulatives coming in the next few months early, so we can take pictures of them.  So we have some awesome boats that you will be getting soon if you subscribe to Mother Goose Time.  I put one in each square of the ice cube tray and left the droppers there.  Peter chose to fill the tray with water and freeze the boats.  We played with the frozen boats the next day.


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