Tot School: Bugs

~ Peeper is 44 months old ~

A Note To My Regular Readers: I may be repeating some photos or stories that I've already published, but I want to put all our learning activities in the one post that's part of the Tot School link-up.

Tot Schoolers: Welcome! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to stay for a while, and have a look around. I'll give you a fair warning that much of my blog is PG-13, but my Tot School link-up posts will always be G-Rated.

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From the birds, we moved on to the bees. And the ladybugs, and the fireflies, and the crickets, and several of their friends.

Books

• From Caterpillar to Butterfly by Deborah Heiligman
• Chirping Crickets by Melvin Berger
• Face-to-Face with the Ladybug
• How Do Flies Walk Upside Down? by Melvin Berger and Gilda Berger
• Fly, Monarch! Fly! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
• The Beeman by Laurie Krebs
• The Life and Times of the Ant by Charles Micucci
• Jump into Science: Honeybees by Deborah Heiligman
• Fireflies by Nicole Helget
• Lift-the-FlapCreepy Crawlies by Sarah Kahn
• Are You a Grasshopper? by Judy Allen

Bug Notebook Materials

• 2 Teaching Mommies' Preschool Bee Unit
• Preschool Post's Butterfly Life Cycle Cards
• Preschool Printables Beautiful Butterflies
• 1+1+1=1's Very Hungry Caterpillar Printable Pack
• 1+1+1=1's Pretty Bugs and Creatures Preschool Pack

I also had 1+1+1=1's Let's Explore Bugs Ebook downloaded on the iPad, but she was more interested in her other iPad books and games when I tried to show it to her.

She "sort of" helped me to label the bee's parts. Mostly she talked to him. "Hey, Bee? How are you?"

She really enjoyed the bee "paper puzzle," though. She loves those.

She also loved dressing up as a bee.

Reading about fireflies by flashlight when our electricity was out. We also tried to catch some that evening, but were not successful.

The Queen Bee!

We did an experiment to find out if ants would prefer peanut butter (protein and fat) or jelly (sugar). Peeper's hypothesis was that they would prefer the jelly.

We put a bit of each on a piece of paper and put them in the grass.

Then moved them to the dirt. Because Peeper said so.

One big ant, feasting on the jelly.

I didn't see any ants on the peanut butter paper, but then I noticed a trail going underneath it. When I picked it up, there were lots on the bottom, where the fat had soaked through the paper.

Tons of ants under the peanut butter paper.

So, we concluded that they preferred the peanut butter, which is not at all what we expected.

Matching butterflies.

We also did some "help the bee get to his hive" sort of tracing activities, which she is still struggling with, and several "Which one is different?" activities, which she does very well with.

In her "Peeper School" notebook, she did several "find the one that's different" and "find the two that go together" sorts of things, and did well with those, too.

Last Saturday, I took her to see a "look inside" bee hive, which I thought was pretty cool, but I totally forgot to take photos. She was more interested in the goats and bunnies in the petting zoo outside. Oh well.

One activity that I was going to try was "drink like a butterfly" which involved cutting out paper flowers, with a hole in the middle, and putting them on top of cups of juice, then giving her a straw to "fly" around and sip "nectar," but after we'd talking about how the butterfly drinks, the next time she had a straw, she said, "Look, I'm a butterfly drinking nectar!" so I didn't bother with the whole cut-out flower thing.

Another activity that didn't work out so well was measuring how far she could jump if she were a grasshopper, or how far a grasshopper her size could jump. (I just realized, looking at my notes, that it was supposed to be a grasshopper. I told her it was a cricket. Oh well, we didn't actually do it anyway.)

When I read that grasshoppers can jump twenty times their body length, I thought it would be cool to measure out twenty times her height in the backyard. And fairly easy, since she's right at 36" tall, and we own a yardstick.

However, she just wasn't getting it.

When I said, "He can jump twenty times his size!" she mounted the yardstick like a horse, started hopping up and down and said, "I can jump twenty times! One, two, three . . . ."

Maybe we'll try that again, when she's got a better concept of multiplication or scale.

There, were, of course, several other activities, snacks, songs and such that I planned to do with her, but they just didn't happen.

Oh well, I"m sure it's not the last time we'll talk about bugs.

Actually, we'll probably spend a few more days on them, while I get her next unit ready, and I'm thinking that tomorrow, we might make Apple and Honey Muffins, from Grandma's recipe in The Beeman.

We are taking the books back to the library in the morning, and will check out new books for our next unit - Safari Animals. Or something like that. Basically "ga-waff-es" and their neighbors. I'm thinking giraffes, elephants, lions, tigers, hippos, things like that. We'll see what we can find.