Today in our whole group time, we talked about bees, pollination, and honey. I had the children cup their hands and pretend to be flowers. I put a bee puppet on my hand and showed the children how the bees go from flower to flower to collect nectar… but in the process they pollinate the flowers. Our new big word for the day was “pollination.”
I used colored water and a turkey baster to show the children how the bees suck up nectar from the flowers turn it into honey and put it into honeycombs (an egg carton for my illustration).
The last thing I showed them in group time was a dead bumblebee I had found yesterday. I wanted them to get a good, close (safe) look at what a bee looks like. They noticed how fuzzy bees are!
{group #1}
In this group, the children made number caterpillars with glass gems. They had to choose a card, identify the number, then make a “caterpillar” using the corresponding amount of gems.
{group #2}
This group was focused on prewriting and fine motor skills as we worked on writing our names with rainbow pasta wheels. The children would spell out their names as I wrote them on the butcher paper for them. If they needed help, I would write out their name while saying each letter. The children, then, had to use their fine motor skills to place the pasta on the lines of the letters.
{group #3}
This was a very hands-on group as the children got to try out what I had demonstrated during whole group time. They pretended to be bees putting honey into the honeycomb. They used their fine motor and transfer skills to complete this task. They squeezed then released the top of the turkey baster while it was inside the bottle, sucked up the water, and transferred it to the egg carton.
