Book choices for today:

The Reason for a Flower   Ruth Heller
Honey   Pam Robson
Are You a Bee?   Judy Allen
Bees   Gallimard Jeunesse
Busy, Buzzy Bees   Allan Fowler

Botany: (first circle)

Need for lesson – Real or fake flower to demonstrate parts.

Botany 27
Let’s look this flower and review some of its parts. The petals all together are called the corolla. We found out that a flower has both male and female parts and learned the names of some of them. The stamens, pistil, stigma, calyx, and the we also found out that many flowers have a sweet liquid called nectar.
The stamens make a powdery dust called pollen. To make a seed, pollen from the stamens of one flower must reach the pistil of another. When this happens it is called pollination. Most plants are pollinated by pollen from another plant of the same kind. This is called cross-pollination. A few plants can pollinate themselves. This is called self-pollination. Pollen grains come in many different shapes, but they are always too small to see properly without a magnifying glass.
How does pollen from one flower reach the female parts of another? Flowering plants need help to spread their pollen. Some plants use the wind to carry the pollen from one flower to another. Many flowers are pollinated by insects, birds, or other animals. Once a flower has been pollinated, a seed begins to grow inside it. The flower has done its job and the petals start to die and fall away. The seeds now contain all the parts that will grow into a new plant and the food it needs to start growing. Do you remember when we talked about seeds and the baby plant inside of them just waiting to grow? Isn’t is amazing how flowers make seeds for new plants to grow?

Parts of a flower

Additional Works:

Flower Seed Matching – I took the seeds out of flower seed packets and placed them between two pieces of wide tape and made a matching workout it using the packets they came in. Control of error is numbers on the back of the packets that match the ones on the seeds.

Felt Flowers – The cards are from homeschoolcreations.com. I decided to make felt pieces that the children could match like the one on the card.

Simple Subtraction – These are flower erasers.

Flower Line Tracing – These are also from homeschoolcreations.com. I have the children place tracing paper pieces over them with paper clips and trace over the lines.

Seed Matching

Felt Flowers

Simple Subtraction

Line Tracing

Practical Life:

Transfer – Spooning
Eye-Dropper

Spooning

Eye-Dropper

Zoology: (second circle)

Need for lesson – Pictures of bees.

Zoology 36
We have started talking about the invertebrate group of insects. Bees are another kind of insect. There are about 20,00 species of bees. Some of the ones we may be familiar with are honey bees, bumble bees, and sweat bees. Bees are found all continents except for Antarctica. Bees have two antenna and two pairs of wings. Bees live in colonies and may have up to 40,00 bees in them!
Honey bees are social and cooperative insects. The bees are organized into three types. Worker bees are the ones we often see flying around. They are female bees. Some jobs of the worker bees are to build honeycombs, collect pollen and nectar to feed the colony, keep the hive clean, and help to circulate air in the hive by beating their wings. The comb is made up of hexagonal shaped cells and are used to store nectar, pollen, and water. There is usually one queen in a hive and her job is to lay eggs. Insects go through metamorphosis. Bees go through four stages of development; egg, larvae, pupa, and adult bee. The male bees are called drones. The female bees store venom in a sac attached to their stingers.
The honey bees sense of smell helps them to find the flowers they need to collect nectar. As bees feed on the nectar inside of flowers, they get covered in pollen from the flower’s stamens. Some of this pollen will rub off on the pistil of the next flower it visits. This is how insects help flowers to pollinate. Bees store the collected nectar they get from the flowers in their special honey stomachs. When their stomachs are full of nectar they go back to the hive and regurgitate, or spit back out, the nectar into honey cells. Then they fan their wings to remove moisture. The nectar then changes and becomes honey. So bees are important, in what ways?

Bee Picture (from: Bees by Deborah Hodge)

Honey Comb Sample

Additional Works:

Bee Matching Cards – These are from kidssoup.com.

Bee Tic-Tac-Toe – These are from childcareland.com

Bee Matching

Bee Tic-Tac-Toe

Art:

Bee Puppets – The children color and glue the be parts onto a cup and place their hand inside for a puppet. I do not know the source.

Bee Puppet

Songs/Poems:

Uncle Fumble Bumble Bee
Uncle Fumble Bumble Bee began to buzz around.
He circled once, he circled twice, and landed on the ground.
He took a step and saw he wasn’t getting anywhere;
So, up he flew! Well, wouldn’t you? And now he’s over there!

Hickety Tickety Bumble Bee (Have a bee prop to be passed around the circle to each child for thier turn. This is a syllable game, where the bee is passed and placed in front of one child at a time during the rhyme.)

Hickety Tickety Bumble Bee
can you say your name for me
Lisa – That has two sounds
Let’s clap them out, Li-sa

Here is the Beehive (finger rhyme)
Here is the beehive. Where are the bees?
Hidden away where nobody sees.
Watch and you’ll see them come out of the hive
One, two, three, four, five.
Buzzzzzzz…..all fly away!