Five in a Row - The Bee Tree

We rowed the Bee Tree after our row of Mirette on the High Wire.  The Bee Tree is a book by Patricia Polacco which tells the story of a little girl and her grandpa who chase the bees to their hive.  Along the way, a myriad of people join in.  It is a fun little story.

A lot of my craft ideas came from my Pinterest board.

Bee jars.

 

 We each made one

 We filled the bee jars with "pollen" (yellow pompoms) and later used them as math manipulatives to help with adding and subtracting.

 

 I also created a game in which we rolled a die and had to collect the correct amount of pollen from the flower for our bee jar.

 Two Teaching Mommies has a great Bee printable pack.  We did a lot from it.

 

I altered this one a bit to fit J-jo.  He loves to glue.  Upper case and lower case matching.  He is surprisingly extremely good at this, even without being able to tell me the letter sounds. (He does point to the correct letter sound when asked though.)

 Roll and make a bee.  Bear enjoyed this.

 

 Spin and graph.  Bear LOVED.

 Count and clip.  Too hard for J-jo alone and too easy for Bear.

Craft - make thumbprint bees.

 And Do-A-Dot the letter Bb.

 

 Of course, we also did most activities and discussions in the FIAR manual, but you'll need the book for those:)  We used Homeschool Share for those resources.  They included learning about Michigan and onomatopeia, to list our two favorites.

 Here is the flapbook for onomatopoeia.

We did some work on the parts of bees too.  Mostly in French.  I found a lot of French resources for bees, surprisingly, and I even found a book, from my childhood, about bees on the shelf.

 I threw in a couple of Montessori practical life items.

Tweezing pollen, or spooning it, or simply using your pincer grasp.  Skill - one-to-one correspondence.

 Tweezing bees - Dollar Tree beads, sharpie, wax liners from empty cereal box (parchment paper would work too) for the wings.

 The best part was making our very own paper mache beehive!