Bees and caterpillars

Monday is a sunny day. That is what it says on our calendar today. It was a lovely sunny day in the park and we played with bubbles. We tried to catch the blossoms as they fell from the cherry blossom tree and we walked around looking for treasure in nature. We collected baby pine cones, which we brought back to school. The weather was warm and we didn’t even need our jackets. We hope that this warm sunny weather is here to stay. You can see from the photos above that we painted with yellow and black. One of the insects that we are learning about is bees and we know that they are yellow and black stripes. We took our time to paint one stripe at a time on our page and when we turned around and looked at Hisami, we saw that her top was yellow with thin black stripes on it. It was almost as if she was a bee too. We will use these paintings as backdrops for another activity that we will do during the month.

Together with bees we have been learning about flowers because bees love flowers; they collect nectar and pollen from them which they take back to their hive so that they can make honey. We read a story this morning called “The Honeybee and the Robber”. It was about worker or honey bees and what they do inside and outside their hive. Luckily they have a guard bee at the entrance to their hive because he caught a bear trying to steal honey. Unfortunately for the bear he was stung; and it was also unfortunate for the bee because when bees sting, they die.

“When a honey bee stings a person, it cannot pull the barbed stinger back out. It leaves behind not only the stinger, but also part of its abdomen and digestive tract, plus muscles and nerves. This massive abdominal rupture kills the honey bee. Honey bees are the only species of bees to die after stinging.”

We did a simulation of a bee stinging someone using plasticine. Shelley made a bee out of plasticine, pipe cleaners for its antennae and a matchstick for its sting. She made up a story about a bee flying around in the garden and then it saw a finger and became frightened. Bees don’t just sting everyone, they do this when they are frightened and feel the need to protect themselves. So our pretend bee, stung our pretend finger (which was also made out of plasticine). When it wanted to fly away, after stinging the finger, it pulled and pulled but because its sting was stuck inside the finger, when it pulled, it left half of its body behind and of course, we knew what the outcome for the bee was……………..it died! We think that maybe the bee should not sting anyone or any animal and then it won’t die.

We are in the process of making things for our Garden dioramas and made caterpillars this morning. We took two strips of green paper; one was light green and the other one was a darker shade of green. We attached them at right angles and then folded one and then the other, continuing this until we came to the very end of the paper. Then we taped the ends together so that they would not come apart and we made eyes for the caterpillar. We didn’t make legs for him though and we think that caterpillars do have legs. We will have to discuss this tomorrow with our teachers.

During one of our circle times today, we changed the calendar and remembered that it is April now and not March. The weather changed throughout the day; sometimes it was bright and sunny and sometimes it was cloudy and gray. It didn’t matter to us at all.

Today was our first gymnastics lesson with Miyashita sensei. We enjoyed his lesson and he did many things that were the same as Tanaka sensei, which made it easier for us to adjust to having a new teacher today. He had one of the experienced sensei’s with him, to guide him and help him learn how best to teach us. We love our gymnastics lesson and look forward to them each week.

Thanks for a great start to the week and we will see you tomorrow.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel