Paper Tube Honeycomb Bee Craft

I had initially wanted to row "The Bee Tree" by Patricia Polacco in the spring, but because the book happened to be "staring" at me whenever I opened up a cupboard, I decided to give it a go ; ) Just go with the flow-- that is how we roll.... sometimes!

I wasn't sure what to expect when I began reading... something about bees, obviously. Little did I know that after one reading I would fall in love with the underlining moral of the story. Here is an excerpt of my favorite part of the book:

"Mary Ellen savored the honey on her book.

'There is such sweetness inside of that book too!' he said thoughtfully. 'Such things... adventure, knowledge and wisdom. But these things do not come easily. You have to pursue them. Just like we ran after the bees to find their tree, so you must also chase these things through the pages of a book!'"

Homeschooling with Five in a Row

I filled our book basket with several books about bees, as they were our focus for the week, but we also:

watched The Magic Schoolhouse- In the Beehive on You Tube
worked on ordinal numbers & rhyming words using the poem, Five Busy Honey Bees (idea came from Classroom Fun)
completed a Onomatopoeia activity; I used a sticker for the 'activity' and T had to come up with a sound word and use it in a sentence. For example:

Action: sticker of a kangaroo

Sound: "Boing! Boing!"

Sentence: "Boing! Boing! went the kangaroo in the hot desert."

Copy work
Hexagon/ Honeycomb activity (idea from Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational-- LOVE her blog!)
Found similarities and differences in: The Bee Tree by Patricia Polacco to The Bee Tree by Steven Buchmann

It just so happened that on our first day of rowing, a little friend visited us inside our house-- not sure how he got there. Unfortunately for him, he was met with an untimely death! Though he was dead, T insisted we put him in our little petri-dish-- just in case ; )

Not sure what happened this week, but these are the only other picture I have!

With my stash of paper tubes, we made Paper Tube Bees and honeycombs for a little math/ art combo! Since we used my stash, we now have 5 honeybees floating around the house! They are pretty cute, though!

To make the paper tube honeycombs, we sliced a TP roll into small circles and then molded them into the shape of a hexagon. After we had several, we used hot glue to keep them together.

For the bee, we brought out our stash of paint, pom poms (for head), and pipecleaners (for legs and wings!).

We inserted a large black pom pom into one end of the paper tube for its and glued googly eyes onto its face. We cut up several black pipe cleaners and pushed them through the sides of the paper tube for its legs, shaped two pipe cleaners into wings.... and don't forget the antennae!