Busy Bees and FREEBIE

Oh my!  I have not posted in what feels like a very long time.  What a busy time of year!  Shopping, planning, shopping, crafting...it is hard to keep up!

Here's what we did last week!

We follow the Reading Street stories and last week was Honey Bees.

With the help of some google searching, pinterest looking, and blog postings, we came up with some great activities to really hit home how important bees are to our environment.

I found a great book called Bee and Me.  I had never read it before but...oh...my...it fit what we were trying to teach the firsties perfectly!  And they loved it because it had the moving pictures in it.

Then we showed about 2-3 minutes of clips from The Bee Movie.  There is one scene that illustrates pollination and the bees explain why it is so important.  THEN it shows what the world would look like without pollination.  It was perfect!

I saw on a few different blogs that using Cheetos could really illustrate how pollination occurs.  So we gave it a try.  And of course it was a hit!

Here are my cute little flowers and with their pollen.

They had to touch each new flower they visited.

Some of them started to really rub the pollen on!

To assess the students, we created the following form below.  We used the common core and our science standards to help us.  Pictured below is just the first page of the assessment.  The second and third page are a picture sort of things that bees do and do not impact.  If you click on the caption, you can download it!

Click HERE to download this assessment

 Our lucky green chimps also used a bee to help them practice their spelling words (along with the powerpoint).  They were super excited to write their words on the bee and they look super cute hanging in the hall (inside their hive).

And of course my good friend Natalie supported all of this great bee learning in math.  Thanks!

We really enjoyed our bee week!  But next up...Pete the Cat Saves Christmas!  Our entire building is going to go Pete crazy the week before winter break.  We could not be more excited.  Can't wait to show you all that we do!

On a final note...
Hope everyone is enjoying this great season.  We are having extremely warm weather for December and it is really throwing me off this year.  But I am trying to take advantage of it.  We went to the zoo last week (when it was 70 degree out) to soak up all their Christmas lights.  It was great, as always!

Next up on the holiday to-do list...buckeyes!  YUM!

Em