As predicted, we fell far short of finishing everything from our A is for Apple unit. I’m totally cool with that. Raptor and I had a delightful week (ok, that’s a bit of a stretch. I’m sure anyone who has had prolonged experience with a 3 year old is giving me the side eye right about now.) and I think it really helped that I had some go to activities planned. Our Bee week is a little less structured, only because I found that the structure wasn’t working for us. I printed off a bunch of “worksheets” (Kate couldn’t get enough of these last week), planned 5 crafts/ activities, and made 5 Montessori-ish trays.
I keep our trays in this cabinet. It was just a modular bookshelf thingy from Target, but RaptorDad was kind enough to add doors that latched when I decided to repurpose it from shoe storage to work tray storage. He even spray painted the doors with chalk board paint. Y’all, he’s a keeper. 😀
Our first tray this time is an oldie but a goodie. Transferring pompoms (yellow and black this week to go with the bee theme) from a bowl into a muffin tray with tongs.
I think she’s going to *love* this one, though I’ll admit that I have some reservations about giving her free reign with the glue stick. I cut out all of the pieces for the bee (including wax paper wings) and put them in a tray along with a marker, glue stick, and an example.
This one goes along with a little song. Something about bees which escapes me at the moment. ::note to self, look this up before tomorrow:: I bought the bees at a teacher supply store a million years ago, they’re Learning Trend. I cut the bee hive out with my Cricut using this SVG file.
Edited to add: OK, I just looked it up. Here ya’ go. Incidentally, they have a ton of cute Montessori bee ideas.
Here is the beehive
But where are the bees
Hiding inside where nobody sees
Watch and you’ll see them come out of their hive — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
RaptorDad made me these life cycle cards.
Raptor seemed a bit bored with just the alphabet last week, so I thought I would mix it up a bit these weeks. I wrote out some CVC words on beehives and then wrote the corresponding letters on some bees. I deliberately did the words in lowercase and the letters in uppercase so Raptor could practice matching. I hoping that this encourages some phonics practice, but I’m not overly concerned about it.
The other thing that I did this week was to prep some craft projects. I have tissue paper and contact paper all ready to make some more faux stained glass. This time a bee and the letter B.
We found these little finger puppets at Joannes and I sorted them so they would be easier to assemble later. It makes 3 bees.
And how awesome are these?!? They’re another RaptorDad find from Joannes. I’m thinking that one day we’ll do a sensory bin with spit peas and these, then another day we’ll make and decorate some cookies with the. Which reminds me, I need to add split peas to the grocery list. 🙂
That gives us 4 special things to do, in addition to the trays. We have tentative plans to go to a strawberry farm (B is for berry!) on Friday and I think that will round out our week nicely.
I’m currently working on C is for Caterpillar and D is for Dinosaur. Suggestions for other letters? I’m leaning towards F is for Frog and H is for Heart (so that I can reuse all of my Valentine’s Day stuff!) but other than that I’m open to ideas. 🙂