Buzzzzzzz

Now that our tree is in bloom, some friendly bees have come to join us.

Like those cyclops bees? Her aim is to make a face in profile, but she doesn’t know to start the mouth from the edge of the face.

As usual, we worked on these together. I have discovered that Ellie likes to work alongside me, instead of being directed. This turned out to be a very, very fun project. We were able to talk about lots and lots of things including: insects having three parts to their bodies, the word “hive” and a bit of multiplication. Science, vocabulary and math all wrapped up into one art project. Love!

I let her choose to make three, four, or five bees. She chose four. I cut out twelve circles from yellow paper. We talked about the three body parts of an insect using simple names: head, chest and stomach part. Then I asked, “If each bee has three parts in his body and we want to make four bees, how many yellow circles do we need?” Ellie tallied it up in her head and came up with the correct answer: twelve. That’s my girl! I didn’t want to talk about any of the math terms like “multiplication” or “times”, but I did want to start showing her how numbers work.

For each bee I drew three dots on a piece of paper. The idea was to practice glueing. Ellie put a dot of glue onto each dot I had drawn and then glued a yellow circle in that spot.

Once the glue had dried we used a black marker to add stripes, faces and wings. Then we cut out our happy bees.

The hive was made by tearing bits of a brown paper bag and then glueing them onto a rough hive shape.

Cheery little spring bees. Buzz, buzz, buzzzzz.