FIAR-The Bee Tree

 This week's row was The Bee Tree, by Patricia Polacco. This was a cute story about chasing bees to the bee tree and finding some sweet honey. I was hoping that we would be able to see some bees up close, so I posted on a local bee keepers page on Facebook. I asked if anyone would be willing to let us come by and see some bees up close. Just something basic. One of them messaged me, so we went by for a peek!

 Since the bees were underneath the screen, Lily got to get up close to them. It was still a little chilly out, so most of the bees are hiding in the middle layers of their hive to stay warm. We got to see a few. We could hear the buzzing when the beekeeper took the top layer off.

Lily got to see a real honeycomb up close, and touch it.

 

The beekeeper was even nice enough to give us some yummy honey! We were very excited about this. 

In our sensory bin this week, we had a bag of dry black beans and some mini bee erasers.

We did a lot of activities from http://www.2teachingmommies.com/2011/07/all-about-bees.html

This spin and graph bee activity was a hit for part of our math lessons this week:

We also played a Build a Bee game:

At the end of the book, everyone had some honey, biscuits and tea. Of course, we had to try that wonderful honey the bee keeper gave us, so we had biscuits, tea and honey! ( I cheated and used cinnamon biscuits that you find on the pancake/muffin aisle in the store)

We got a little derailed in the middle of this unit. Both Lily and I got hit with the stomach virus that has been going around everywhere. The beauty of homeschooling, though, is when I have a sick little girl, we can just take a break!

Once we recovered from being sick, we worked on some bee crafts. First, we did some potato prints:

 We made bees out of construction paper:

Honeycomb cereal made a fun (and tasty) art project:

I think Lily's favorite activity of the week was the Honeybee Tree game. You have to remove leaves slowly and carefully, so you won't wake the honeybees!

We finished up the unit with a yummy peanut butter and honey sandwich for dinner. :) Lily said that this was her favorite sandwich.

We also watched The Magic School Bus episode about bees, and the Rachel and the Treeschoolers about insects. I have a subscription to Discovery Streaming, so we watched some short videos showing bees in action.
 This was a fun row, even though we got sick in the middle of it, and I kind of lost my motivation. Oh well, it happens. We will just pick up and move on to our next unit: The Salamander Room. Lots of insects to discover in this one. We got a head start on it already! Our caterpillars arrived in the mail yesterday!