Bee-Themed Tot Trays

It’s been quite a while since I’ve set up Tot Trays at our house, but last week as I was planning out a bee unit study and thinking of activities for my Preschool and Kindergarten guys, trays seemed like the perfect set-up. And I have to say after having these out for a week, I’m remembering all the reasons I like them: fine-motor skills practice, open-ended exploration, creativity, logic, & a defined work-space. What’s not to love! (You can see more about Tot Trays over at 1+1+1=1.)

Here are the Bee-Themed trays that we had out this week:

Make a Beehive

I saw this clever idea for making a beehive out of toilet paper rolls over at Deceptively Educational. We followed her instructions for the most part, only instead of gluing it together we used this as a fine-motor paper-clipping activity. To better accomodate the paper clips, I did cut my hexagonal cells to be a little wider. I found 1 inch to be just right. All the boys really loved this activity and I ended up cutting up more cells for them.

Bee Fraction Puzzles

I made this hexagonal puzzle page to expose my boys to the idea of fractions. I don’t expect full comprehension at this age, just EXPOSURE. While they worked the puzzles we talked and I used keywords like “whole,” “part,” “half,’' “fraction,” etc. There’s a template on the second page of the download that I used to cut the puzzle pieces out of craft foam. You can download your own copy HERE.

Pollen Punch

For this tray I borrowed the flower from our Bee & Pollination Craft-tivity and paired it with a simple hole-punch and some yellow construction paper. The boys punched & punched & punched out “pollen” exercising those little hand muscles along the way.

Bee Life Cycle 3-Part Cards

These Bee Life Cycle 3-Part Cards from Trillium Montessori were a huge hit with Jet. He laid out the full cards and matched up the picture and word cards while we discussed the life cycle of the bee. Another day he put them in a circle to better illustrate the continuing cycle and matched the cards up again. You do have to take the extra step of subscribing to the Trillium Montessori blog to get the link and password for their free downloads page, but (check out those smiles) it was definitely worth it for me!

Nectar Transfer

The boys used a dropper “proboscis” to transfer colored water “nectar” to ice cube tray “cells.” All 3 of my older boys got in on playing with this tray together. This was especially nice because I could hear Dude appropriately using (and inadvertently exposing his brothers to) some newly acquired bee vocabulary as they played. Brother teaching brother! I first saw this idea on the For the Children Blog where they used a turkey baster. My boys would love that, but we didn’t have one so I went with the droppers instead.

Bee Playdough Mat

All of my boys like playdough, so I knew this creative tray would be a hit. It was used multiple times throughout the week. The printable is from This Reading Mama. I just gave them some art supplies that were close at hand and let their imaginations take over. Next time I think I’ll give them scissors too.

If you're looking for more Bee-themed fun check out our
Bee & Pollination Craft-tivity

In addition to the above activities the boys also got to drink juice through their proboscises (straws) and taste test some local wildflower and clover honeys.

Book Recommendations:

As usual books provided the real meat of our unit study.

Here were our favorites.

Literature

The Bee Tree
by Patricia Polacco
The Bee Tree tells the lively story of a little girl and her grandfather who go on a hunt for a Bee Tree. Friends join the pair as they scramble to follow bees back to their hive. There’s not much information on bees in this book, but it’s a lovely & fun story that really encourages literacy in its final pages. I think anyone who loves reading will really appreciate this book.

Bee & Me
by Elle McGuinness
This quick read combines factual information about bees with the sweet story of a bee who gets lost and finds himself stuck inside of a little boy’s room. The book encourages kids not to be afraid of bees, but to appreciate them for their contributions. It’s perfect for even the youngest readers.

Non-Fiction

Honey in a Hive (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2)
by Anne Rockwell
 Honey in a Hive is a great non-fiction bee book for 3-8 year olds. It's 40 pages pack a good bit of knowledge into short descriptions and informative illustrations.

The Honey Makers
by Gail Gibbons
I love, love, love The Honey Makers by Gail Gibbons. There's a wealth of information in this picture book covering everything from bee anatomy, the bee life cycle, a detailed description of the various duties of worker bees, and of course how honey is made. This book is pretty detailed and can be a bit wordy, so I'd recommend it for the 5+ age group. Even I leaned some things from it!

The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive

by Joanna Cole
Who can resist Ms. Frizzle? I know my boys can't! This book follows the adventures of an elementary school class and their ecentric teacher as their bus is magically transformed into a beehive (and the children into bees). Each page is practically overflowing with information as you can see labeled diagrams and notes the children take in their notebooks, as well as speech bubbles that often provide humor and give you insight into each characters personality. There's a lot here for everyone and I'd recommend this book for ages 4+. And if your voice is getting tired by this point there's also the The Magic School Bus TV Series. The Inside a Beehive episode is on disc 4, episode 6. It's very similar content to the book. (I opted to read the other books this week and let the boys watch this one on DVD.)

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Tot School- Letter of the Week- Letter Ii

We're finally finished with our letter Ii week, our first vowel week, and all I can say is, Man are vowels tough! When trying to plan for this week I initially found lots of great ice & ice cream activities, but then decided to instead focus on the short vowel sound since that's the one used most commonly to form words. That pretty much left me scratching my head, but in the end I think we found some great ideas and both Dude and I were happy with the topics we covered.

Our I words: Instrument, Insect, Igloo, Inchworm, Into, Inside, Indian, Itch

   

We kicked off our letter Ii week by pulling out our box of instruments and moving and shaking to our Laurie Berkner DVD. I'm in NO way musically inclined, but this DVD is great for lending itself so easily to the kind of silly dancing that we like to do. We actually have her 2nd DVD on the way right now.

We did an I is for insects page from Making Learning Fun.

Dude did the Getting Ready Letter I Tracing from 1+1+1=1. I put the page in a sheet protector and let him use Dry Erase Crayons . We love these! He's a bit of a perfectionist and often times wants to correct it when he makes a mistake. The dry erase crayons help keep him from getting frustrated. And I like that I don't have to worry about him getting marker on his clothes. 

   

Dude did an igloo craft similar to the one I saw over at Homeschool Creations. He cut up strips of white paper and glued them onto the igloo I had drawn out. I had him use a Q-tip for applying the glue. He actually got bored with this before he was finished though, so I took over the glue application and just let him put on the paper.

 He did his letter I Do-A-Dot painting. Always a favorite! This worksheet is from COAH.

   

For this activity I hid the Indians figures in our sand box and let Dude search for them and count them out into a numbered egg tray. Dude absolutely LOVED this! He was eagerly counting and kept telling me "Now I need to find #_!" I loved the fact that this mixed a sensory experience with math.

I do realize "Indian" may not be the most politically correct term, but they fit in so well with our I theme that we just went with it. Ours came from Dollar Tree. You could also use "insects" instead if you had those.

On a particularly gloomy and rainy day, we reviewed body parts by having Dude scratch itches in the places I called out. 

It didn't have anything to do with the letter I, but Dude enjoyed building block towers with his number cards. You can read the details here on my Tot Trays post.

   

I absolutely loved this math idea when I saw it over at Hart 2 Hart. She used ice, but we went with our Indian figures since we were doing the short i sound. I had Dude roll a number dice that only had 1-3 on it. He then tonged that many Indians into a glass and repeated this step for a second glass.  Next he dumped both glasses into a bowl and then counted out how many Indians he had in the bowl. I added the magnetic numbers as he went to remind him of the numbers he counted. This was his first real introduction to addition and he did pretty well with it and wanted to keep going for awhile.

   

We also used our Indian figures to discuss some positional words. We started with in & inside, but also talked about out, outside, under, on, beside, behind & next to.

We made a fun little insect craft that Dude has enjoyed flying around the house. I figured any insect would do so went went with a butterfly. You can read all the details of how to make it here.

Dude did his letter builders.

He colored his phonics coloring page and then another day glued on pictures of things that start with the letter I. Both printables are from Homeschool Creations. (Some of the pictures start with the long I sound.)

Before I did any inchworm activities with Dude I wanted to make sure he knew what an inchworm was. So we looked at videos of inchworms on Youtube. We liked this one. We also looked at several caterpillar videos and talked about the differences between the two.

Then Dude attempted this inchworm building activity from COAH. He had a tough time with this.

Ok, so it didn't exactly follow our short vowel letter I theme, but I gave Dude some shaving cream to play in so that I could get a meal prepared. I did suggest he draw I's, but he vetoed that idea pretty quickly. I also gave him ice cubes to make it more interesting.

   

Little brother also got in on the fun!

    

We pretended our living room carpet was a lake with crocodiles and Dude had to jump from rock to rock (towel to towel) without falling IN. He had a good time rescuing cars and animals from the window sill. 

We brought our Indians back out for a little memory game. I removed an Indian while Dude had his eyes covered, and then asked him to recall which one was missing.

We discussed the concept of measuring in inches. I wish I had picked out some books to use in advance of doing this activity that were exactly so many inches. Dude was pretty confused when the books fell between 2 numbers.

He did this Letter I search.

 And this inchworm counting activity from COAH.

He sorted some capital and lower case I's that I'd jotted out on scraps of paper.

He worked with the new Letter I CVC  words printable that I made for him. We worked on identifying the ending sound first and then filling in the blank with the correct beginning letter.

And we finished up our I week by making this igloo craft that I saw over at Hart 2 Hart. I knew Dude wouldn't have the patience to do this for long so we used a little bathroom size paper cup and I cut up a cereal box for the base and to make a door. I hot glued the cup and cardboard pieces together ahead of time and let Dude glue on the marshmallows. He ate at least as many as he glued on!

I'm linking this post up to Tot School , Preschool Corner, Show & Tell Blog Hop, the Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection, For the Kids Fridays, & Tot Tuesdays



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