Honeybees!

Hello family and friends!

This has been such a fun week in the Tzemach class! We've really been diving deep into the world of bees and we've learned so much. We took a little vote this morning to see whether or not the kids wanted to continue with this exploration or move on to something new. The large majority voted to move on so we'll be starting a brand new exploration next week. We will meet with the kids on  Monday to see what it will be!

Before I explain all the exciting bee stuff we've been doing, I want to tell you something new we started this week. This week we met with a small group of women from a local assisted living home. We split up into groups with these women and they talked to us and read us all types of wonderful books. The kids really seemed to enjoy it. They were engaged in conversation and had so much to tell me about the stories that they read. This group of women have decided to come out once a month and read to us, the three year old classroom, and the kindergarten classroom. These women couldn't stop telling me how excited they were to work with the kids and how sweet they are. I am so excited that we have the opportunity to work with them. I think it's going to be a sweet benefit to both the women and our students!

We have been loving our bee exploration! The kids have been asking tons of questions and we've been visiting the beehive almost daily. To start our week, we learned how a beehive is made, what different types of bees live in it, and what each bees role is in the colony. We started by asking, what shape is a beehive? We learned that they come in many different shapes and sizes but that each one is similar in the fact that all of them contain "cells", or little holes where the honey is stored. We made some predictions about what shape we thought these cells might be. We pulled out our pattern blocks and searched through them to find different shapes. We asked each child to pick out a pattern block that matched the shape of what they thought the cells looked like. Afterwards, we made our way to the beehive. We held up our shapes and compared them to the actual hive. We learned that each cell is a small hexagon, containing six sides. We're still amazed that these bees can create such a consistent and beautiful shape to each cell!

All this talk of shapes and checking out the hive got us wanting to make our own beehive. We went back to the room and pulled out all of our hexagon pattern blocks and made a beehive with them. We then got some paper and pencils and drew our own bees. We cut them out and played with our pattern blocks. As we played, we talked about the different roles of the bees. Some of the kids asked questions about the queen bee and baby bees. We pulled out books while the kids played and I read to them facts based on questions that they had.

We also made a giant beehive using egg cartons. After another visit to the hive to think about colors, we decided to paint our beehive brown. Once we finished painting, we moved on to making our own bees to live in our hive. We used pipe cleaners, wine corks, and wiggly eyes to make some seriously cute baby bees! Afterwards, we decided that we needed to add some honey and pollen to our hive. I told the kids that it was up to them to find some materials in the room to represent pollen and honey for our hive. These kids seriously impressed me. They came back with the idea of a light brown play dough and yellow crumpled up paper. This is exactly why I let them lead this project, because their ideas were so much better than mine! This has been a huge project that has taken us all week! It's on display in the hallway so I hope you enjoy it. The kids are super proud of it...as they should be! As we made this giant beehive, we continued to ask and answer questions. It was a great time of team work and learning.

Of course we had to spend time this week tasting honey! We sampled some one day and it quickly turned into tasting it everyday. This was a great time for us to talk about how honey is made and why it's made. Also, remember those apples I said that we left out in all the centers? They have been a hit! We had several kids use them with blocks to build their own apple orchard. They would place the blocks upright and balance apples on them to create an apple tree. This also led to some other kids using the blocks to make a giant apple stand. They spent most of center time picking apples and selling them in the stand. What a great way for us to explore math and science during centers! Y'all have some very creative kids!

To finalize our exploration, we asked the kids to tell us some things that they've learned. This is the last part of our KWL chart. I'm blown away at the questions they've been asking and the facts they've been retaining. It's been a wonderful learning experience for all of us! Here are some things that we've learned the past couple of weeks...

- "Bees make honey and put it in the beehive."
- "The worker bees clean the hive and take care of the queen bee and take care of the baby bees."
- "The queen bee lays the eggs."
- "The queen bee is bigger than the other bees."
- "Drone bees are the boy bees."
- "They turn nectar into honey in their honey stomach."
- "The cells are hexagon shapes."
- "An orchard is a place where you pick apples. They grow there."
- "Apples are green, red, and yellow."
- "Pollen is yellow and gold."
- "Bees carry pollen to different flowers. This makes new flowers!"
- "Apple trees grow from seeds and the flowers on the tree grow apples."
- "The inside is called the core."
- "The outside is the skin."
- "Bees stay in their hive in the winter and eat honey they saved."
- "Bees save honey for winter with wax."
- "Bees have long mouths that they use to drink nectar."
- "Bees all stay in the hive in the winter to keep warm."

Thanks for another great week!

Love,
Ms. Rachael



Approaches to Learning

• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment. 

Social & Emotional

• Stands up for rights much of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.
• Recognize own feelings and describe them some of the time.

Language and Literacy

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Respond to elements of colorful language in stores and poetry.
• Retell one or tow events from a story read aloud.
• Create a different form of a familiar word by adding "-ed" ending to show past action.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language. 

Mathematics

• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Classify objects in their environment by color, shape, size or function.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations. 
• Identify two-dimensional shapes: circle, square, triangle and rectangle.
• Organize and represent data with real objects.

 Welcome to our apple orchard!...

 We loved our story time this week!...

Exploring our new beehive and matching the shapes of each cell...

Mmm, we sure do love honey...

                                                

The building process of our giant beehive. It took many steps including: painting and building the hive, making honey and pollen, creating our adult and baby bees...