Bug Homes

This week with Mother Goose Time we learned all about Bug Homes. We talked about bugs that use plants as their homes, live in dirt, make hills, webs, and hives. This was such an interesting week especially for my older daughter. She had so many questions and these topics sparked so many conversations. I think our favorite day was about hives. We learned so much about bees and we even did a fun experiment.

One activity we did was the Honeycomb activity. This was an invitation to create project so I set up everything that they would need and then let them create. This helped my son with his fine motor skills because we used little hexagon stencils to draw the picture, It also gave me a chance to have him verbally tell me what he included in is picture. He did a great job and retained quite a bit of information.

I loved that after the project was over he was able to tell me what was going on in his picture. He included the hexagon cells of the honeycomb, them he used some paint and a brown marker to add honey into the cells, and then he added some rice which were the eggs and finished it off with a drawing of a bee. My daughter enjoyed extending this project and looked at pictures of bee hives and bee keepers online, and we learned that bees have a separate honey stomach that they store the nectar in and when they get back to their hive they transfer the honey mouth to mouth with the honey making bees. They continue to transfer the honey back and forth in this manner until the moisture content is very low and it turns into honey. We also learned that once the babies hatch they are fed a mixture of pollen and honey.

After this we did the Freezing Honey experiment. This was a lot of fun and the instructions for the experiment came on the included science card. This gave us a chance to learn Scientific Reasoning, and Physical Science. We started off by putting 1 tablespoon of honey into each cup. After we did this we then added some water in increasing amounts into each cup, the 5th cup remained pure honey. Then we put them into the freezer for a few minutes. We made predictions on what we thought would happen and then we set up a little data chart.

We ended up noticing that they pure honey didn't exactly freeze solid but it did harden and become less sticky very quickly. The ones that had more water in them turned slushy.

We also watched a cute little movie about bees later in the day and we had a honey sampling.

A side note about this months theme is that it is helping to teach my son that all bugs are living creatures and that you need to be gentle even with bugs. He has learned so much and read some really great picture books about bugs this month that he has grown to appreciate bugs and get excited about them. Also my daughter seems to be a little less afraid of some of them. It is so much fun to go on our forest hikes and hear the excitement over finding and identifying different kinds of bugs. We have become more aware of our paths and seek out bugs to observe. This week at Forest School we went on a hike and found all kids of great bugs.

The millipede and the black slug were our favorite bugs this week and wee saw so many slugs on our trail today. I love that Mother Goose Time is teaching us to love and respect creatures of all sizes.

To see more of what we do in our homeschool check us out on Instagram

*Mother Goose Time has generously provided this curriculum to us in exchange for our stories and honest opinions*