June 2nd
Our first homeschooling adventure has been a blast. We spent the last two weeks in May studying bugs, mainly butterflies and honeybees. We based this unit on two books by Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Honeybee and the Robber.
We started with TVHC since Caleb was already pretty familiar with this book. Caleb’s favorite activity was reenacting the whole story. We had the hungry caterpillar stuffed animal so this was a big help.
Making the Props
Caleb made a chrysalis out of a paper towel tube and decorated it with markers. Getting to use markers is a big treat. It is barely ever allowed since our darling son has issues with what you can and cannot color on.
Butterfly lays the egg on a leaf.
POP, out of the egg comes a very hungry caterpillar.
He eats and eats till he is very fat and then makes a chrysalis around himself.
After staying inside for more than two weeks out comes a butterfly. Or in this case a stuffed caterpillar with some construction paper butterfly wings tied to its middle. But hey, it got the point across and Caleb was quite pleased with it.
And lastly, the butterfly flies round drinking nectar from flowers. Our butterfly was a kamikaze butterfly. It loved to fly very high in the air and then crash to the ground.
We also did some coloring pictures on the Butterfly Life Cycle, checked out some books from the library with beautiful pictures of butterflies, used some sequencing cards that I found online and painted bug sun catchers to hang in our living room window.
June 3rd
To transition into The Honeybee and the Robber we discussed the letter “B” and put stickers of butterflies and bees onto a letter “B” coloring page I printed off.
I found a really cool version of The Honeybee and the Robber at our used bookstore. It is a moving picture book so we had such a fun time reading this every day. We also read The Very Greedy Bee by Steve Smallman and Busy Buzzy Bee a level 1 DK book that Daddy found at the library. This book was so perfect for the preschool age group. It had great photos and information that was just detailed enough that both Caleb and I learned something, but it was not too heavy for Caleb. At the end of the book was a page with pictures and vocab that I copied to use for some of our projects. What a find daddy!
I printed out pictures of a bee hive, bees gathering nectar and pollen, and the cells within the hive. Caleb colored, glued appropriate pictures onto them and labeled specific parts with the vocab we learned.
We also went on a bug hunt outside in our front yard and garden. Caleb had lots of fun with this and we actually did this more than once throughout the week.
Caleb and daddy find a slug under a rock in our garden.
The very first worm Caleb has ever seen or held. He did not want to part with it. But after it had almost been torn in half multiple times I took pity on it and made Caleb put it back where we found it.
A Caterpillar!
Some of the other bugs we found were wasps, spiders, ants, lady bugs and bees. It did not seem to matter whether the bug was dead or alive when we found it; Caleb was interested in them all.
We ended our bug unit with the “Waggle Dance.” I gave Caleb some black and yellow streamers and we danced to Flight of the Bumblebee to show the other bees where the nectar/flowers were.
