Academics – Page 29 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Food Pouch Lid Activities

I’m sure I’m not the first to create a post about what you can do with all those little food pouch lids… because I’m sure there are a LOT of parents out there who have them coming out of their ears!!! (I know I shudder to think how many we just threw away before we were saving them… sigh.) So… if your kids eat anything from a pouch, SAVE THE LIDS! These are just THREE of the activities you can do with these – not to mention color sorting, using them for counters for addition/subtraction, etc.

Fall Tree Activity – See my blog post yesterday for this fabulous activity – where your child matches numbers to encourage recognition out of order. And just a side note – you realize you could do any numbers you wanted – it could be 50-70 or 80-100 (although you’d have to write really tiny to fit three digits on the center of one of those lids, you could easily write the number on the side – and go as big as you want!) OR – what about this extension for your older kids? Write an addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problem on the side of the lid, and they have to match it to the answer on the tree! Again, color coding helps make it a little easier, so if you have two or even three colors of lids that are fall leaf colors, that would be awesome. Or, make it more challenging by making all your leaves/pouch tops the same color!

Imaginative Play Activity – Build your family! Did you ever think that you could make people with these little pouch tops? And houses? Becca loves to build with her pouch tops, so one fun activity was to make our family. I drew faces on four lids, and then we stacked them up by height to create our family! Now, you could take it a step further and hot glue them together so they could walk around and go into their house, etc. But Becca enjoys building the people over and over. She searches through and finds the faces, and then builds them over and over again. She knows Mommy and Daddy are four pouch tops, she’s three, and Baby Grayson is two. So it makes a great counting activity, but stacking them is also great for her fine motor development – because by the time she has three stacked up, she has to be very careful to not knock them over! She loves building castles and houses for her people, as well! Super fun.

Patterning – I think another fabulous thing we have done with these is using them to create patterns. Patterns are all around us in our world, but to recognize and create patterns is an important skill we must first be taught. Becca is a huge fan of patterns – she’s always wanting me to make harder patterns for her to complete. Sadly, she’s only a fan of three or four different kinds of pouches… so we can’t make patterns with very many colors of pouch lids, but that’s ok! We use what we have! If you aren’t familiar with teaching patterns to children, you might be interested to know that once in school, your child will learn to “name” their patterns with letters. You can start coordinating this and teaching your child early to name their pattern. For example, the patterns in this picture are named (L to R, bottom to top) an AB pattern, an ABB pattern, an AB pattern.

Counting/Ordinal Position/One-to-one Correspondence – I’m always a fan of using REAL LIFE objects to help teach little ones to count. So, it’s as simple as what I did for the fall tree – put the numbers that you want to work on on top of each lid. Then your child can use them to make a number line, putting each number in it’s correct spot; they can use the numbers to count the lids and see how many they have; and it’s also helpful for those who like to just keep counting, and struggle with One-to-one Correspondence. Becca used to really struggle with that. There could be four of an item, and she’d put her finger on each of the four and count to four, but then keep touching the items and count however high she wanted to count. She still does that occasionally – with a grin on her face because she knows she’s doing it wrong. What really helped her to understand this concept was to count items that had a number on them. She would touch the number, and say it. When she ran out of numbers, she was done counting. This activity might help your child if he/she struggles with this concept as well.

Alphabet Matching/ Ordering / Word Building – Another activity that I want to do with her soon (as soon as we have enough more pouch lids) is taking these over to the Language Arts side of things, and putting the letters of the alphabet on them. You could put an upper case letter on one, and lower case on another and match the upper and lower case together. You could simply practice putting them in order. Or, what I’d really like to do, is to start word building. Pre-program lids to have the letters you need to build basic sight words, or high interest words – for any age child. If your older child is super into dinosaurs, save up a bunch of pouch lids and make enough to spell out types of dinosaurs! The possibilities are endless. If you are doing word building, I recommend having a pre-printed sheet of words that your child can use to spell from the pouch lids you’ve made available. Have him/her build the word on the mat right next to the pre-printed word, or if you have space, ideally, they would build the word right on top of the word you’ve pre-printed. So you’ll have to check your spacing. I’ll be working on creating some of these for basic sight words SOON, and will share the printable when I have them created. 🙂

Do you have more food pouch lid activities that you’d like to share? Post them over on my Facebook page! I’d love to see what you are doing, and would love to have you be a part of the Facebook community I’m attempting to build! 🙂 (Be sure to click “like” over on the right-hand side of my blog! 🙂 )

Fall Tree Activities

There are a ton of fabulous fall tree activities out there, but I’ve really been striving to be somewhat original in my activities. All of my ideas are of course spurred from something I’ve seen online, and in no way am I saying I’m the first to ever do these this exact way… because I’m sure I’m not. But here are three activities we’ve done in the past couple weeks to create fall trees different ways, modifying someone else’s ideas.

I’m loving contact paper activities. I saw this post from Allison over at No Time for Flashcards, and it really got me thinking. One of the fine motor activities I haven’t really done with Becca is paper tearing. So, I gathered three sheets of construction paper – one each of red, yellow, and orange, and I did something I’m horrible at… I drew a tree on contact paper. (Draw it on the non-sticky side.) Then, I got out my painter’s tape and taped it – sticky side out – to one of our back door windows. And I taught Becca how to tear paper! We had a blast tearing our paper leaves, and sticking them on the tree. And, I left the paper where she could access it throughout the past couple weeks, and she has added more leaves as time has gone by. Despite my disdain for my drawing abilities, she immediately knew it was a tree, and has been very proud of her fall tree! So, I count this one as a success!

I love buttons. Like seriously LOVE buttons. As a kid, I loved going over to my Grandma’s house, pulling out her button drawer, and playing with all the buttons – sorting them, stacking them, whatever. Just digging my hands into them. I guess it was my very own “sensory bin” back before that was even a term. HA! The cool thing is that I now have a button box – that includes all of Grandma’s buttons, all of Cody’s Mima’s buttons from her sewing table, and quite a few new buttons that I’ve added myself. It’s an awesome resource, and a ton of fun! So I saw this post from Maggy at Red Ted Art, and it got me thinking – I could create a button tree with Becca that was specifically fall! So, I found a tree clipart online (after having learned my lesson on the contact paper tree… Mommy can do lots of things, but drawing just ain’t one of them!), and printed it on some beautiful textured blue card stock. (Want your own tree? Get the free printable here! I simply typed “winter tree clipart” in Google and found this tree from ClipartBest.com and made it fit like I wanted on my document… I’m saving you the work!) And after the tree was printed, we sifted through the button box, found some fabulous buttons, and then set to work. Becca placed each button where she wanted it, and I used the hot glue gun to stick them down. We had some serious fun making this tree, and I think it turned out simply beautiful. She is so proud of her button tree!

I knew I was going to do this post, so I stretched myself, and said, ok what’s at least one more way I can do a fall tree? I had to dig deep for this one. But, I used what we had laying around – tops to Becca’s favorite applesauce pouches (thank you, HEB!) and decided to work on her random number matching skills. The girl can count – like mad. But sometimes just seeing a number (beyond ten), recognizing it, and then being able to match it to itself out of order… well, that’s still a little rusty. So here’s what I did. I drew on a large sheet of construction paper (again, apology for my lack of drawing skills, but she knew it was a tree, so who cares?) a tree, and then traced around a pouch cap to be sure my circles were the right size. I covered the whole sheet in contact paper since laminating and using twenty mins later wasn’t an option… Then I labeled each pouch cap with a number, and colored the circles on the tree random colors… and labeled them with numbers as well. It helps a little because they aren’t all one color, so she knows that the orange ones on the paper will be from the peach applesauce pouches, and the red ones on the paper will be from the plain applesauce pouches – so it helps her check the numbers and make sure she’s on the right track. She keeps going back to this activity and pulling out new numbers. I’ve found that she likes to start the activity in the morning before we go anywhere – she’ll place one or two pouch caps – and then later in the day she’ll place three or four more, come back later and place a couple more… she just doesn’t have the energy or patience to do all twenty of them at one time. Which is fine with me. I plan to stick these pouch caps in a bag, and pull this back out next fall – when she should be able to do all of them in one setting.

Honeybee Math

To extend our trip to the Bee Ranch, I created a little addition worksheet to start introducing Becca to the concept of addition. Except I didn’t realize that my cognitively gifted child would have the concept already, and was ready for more difficult numbers and equations. But, she did enjoy seeing the little bees, and this FREE PRINTABLE might be perfect for your child!! (I hope someone gets some good use out of it!!) I put it in a Write And Wipe Pocket (aff link – thank you!) so we can use it again, and she ended up turning the pocket over and drawing with the dry erase marker – a “bee.” 🙂

A Trip to the Bee Ranch

Becca has had a fascination with bees almost since the beginning. We chose to decorate her nursery with classic Pooh stuff – and a friend helped paint a gorgeous mural on the wall – with Pooh and Piglet floating with their blue balloon away from a hive of overprotective honeybees. This helped Cody’s mom to determine that she would call Becca “Honeybee.” So that’s part of it – the early indoctrination. But, she also loves the little kids show about friendship and family called “The Hive” – where the main character is a little honeybee named “Buzzbee.” If you haven’t seen it, it really is adorable, and the accents are great – they are all British. You can find it on Disney Jr, or on Netflix Kids.

But then there’s the other aspect of honeybees that Becca loves, and that’s what they produce – honey! We go to the farmer’s market at the Pearl Brewery downtown (on the Riverwalk) every Saturday morning and participate in a CSA group with a local farmer. In walking back and forth to their booth every week, we passed several times (ok, passed every Saturday for like 10 months – I’m ashamed to admit) a booth that I finally stopped at one day. And man, am I glad I did!!! The Gretchen Bee Ranch bottles and sells at the market LOCAL honey! If you’ve been to a grocery store in San Antonio, you know that the closest “Local” you can find is sourced North of Austin… which isn’t local at all since it’s over three hours away and I guarantee you those bees aren’t flying anywhere down here to gather their pollen! So, if you’re looking for truly local honey to help with allergies, the Gretchen Bee Ranch is the place. I love that they even have a type of honey sourced in the county where we live – since we live about an hour West of where the ranch is. It’s awesome too – that every Wednesday they open up their shop for anyone! No age restrictions!

So I decided it was time to take my little honeybee out to the ranch to meet Mr. Mark (the bee keeper) and to learn some more about honeybees! You’d have thought I gave her a million bucks. She has talked about those bees and all the honey she got to taste so much! She’s also super excited that we’re going back as a family to take Daddy when they have their open house in November! Here are a few pictures of our experience. I wish I had taken more!

We got to look at some “sleepy” bees on their tray, and then in the display case, Mr. Mark pointed out the queen bee, and Becca enjoyed following her around with her finger, and went back a few times to find her again.

I think she could have stood there and watched those bees all day long!

She and George followed Mr. Mark over to see the bee hives (from a distance).
She enjoyed looking at the beeswax products, and tasting several kinds of honey! If you live anywhere near Seguin, it’s worth a trip!

On the way home, she asked me a few questions about the bees, which we typed up together and sent in an email over Facebook, and Mr. Mark’s wife kindly answered them for us.

Here’s what we asked about the bees:

Dear Mr. Mark,
Thank you for showing us the bees and the honey today! I have a couple of questions for you.
How old are the bees? I’m two.
Does the queen have a name? My name is Becca.
How many bees live in a box? We have four people in our house. And two dogs and two fish and our kitty lives outside.
What is a bee’s favorite weather? I like sunny days.
Thank you!

Her Reply/What we learned:

Hello Christy and Becca,
Thanks for visiting the Bee Ranch this morning. Mark is working out in the bee yards so I will help by answering your questions.
The bees all vary in age and depending on the time of year, their life span may be as short as three weeks in summer and three months when it’s winter.
The queen bees do not have names. With over 150 queens, we call them all Queenie.
During summer and at the height of honey production and food availability, a hive can grow to 100,000 bees! During cold times when there is not much to eat on, the queen knows to reduce her colony down to as low as perhaps 20,000.
Bees adapt fairly well to weather but they do love the warm sun so that they can fly out to forage for food! You are just like a honeybee.
Take care and enjoy every day.

Halloween Sensory Gel Bag

Becca loves sensory gel bags… and they are super easy to make!!

You’ll need:
a strong freezer bag (quart size is perfect)
clear book/box tape
clear hair gel – clear works best for this b/c you’re going to be adding your own color… I found a great big bottle at Dollar Tree and used the entire bottle in this bag.
food coloring
stuff to go in it – So I made mine orange, and just used a bunch of sparkly black sequins I had – to make it sort of Halloween-ish. I saw an idea online that used google-eyes of various sizes. Or, you could get a bunch of little spiders (I saw them at Dollar Tree) to put inside, or leaf confetti (also at Dollar Tree) if you wanted to make it fall, but NOT Halloween. So there’s lot of fun options!

Make sure before you put ANYTHING inside that you secure all three closed sides with book tape to prevent little holes and leaks. Then, fill with your gel, food coloring, and stuff. Squeeze as much air out as possible, and zip closed, then fold the top down and secure with more tape.

Becca has been enjoying hers not only for picking up and squishing, but also for viewing on her light box! And how awesome does it look with the light shining thru?