I am always amazed at how our little themes seem to just pop up.  And they often have nothing to do with me trying to plan, it is normally the kids finding something interesting.  We seem to have stumbled onto a bit of a bee theme, my son found a book at the local library – Flight of the Honey Bee and we were given another book Bee Boy at around the same time and totally unplanned we are looking at Bees and pollination.

The Flight of the Honey Bee is a stunning children’s book which tells a short story about a Bee and manages to weave in lots of facts along the way.  It is part of the nature storybook series which is a series of books about animals that we love as the kids have always found the stories enjoyable but full of interesting facts about the animals.

It starts off by explaining that bees are always changing jobs – from a cleaner to babysitter, a builder, a guard, a scout and then a harvester and the story is about a scout.  It follows the scout as she flies out in search of flowers, it details how she navigates, how she avoids rain as it can damage her and which predators are out there (I never realized so many other animals ate bees).

Once she gets back to her hive she does a dance for the other bees which explains where the flowers are.  I loved this bit about the dance and both my kids found it fascinating that the bees communicate where the flowers are by dancing.

It also explains a bit about how the life in the hive works.

Both my kids found the book very interesting (even my older one).  And they liked the way the information was included in the story.

So I had a quick search and I found this page All about bees from Twinkl for my son (part of their paid for package).

And for my daughter we went more onto the pollination process.  We found this really good Flower Anatomy page from Education.com

And we also downloaded this FREE Parts of a Flower page from Twinkl so she could label her own flower and include the diagram in her Science book.

My daughter has a notebook  where she keeps a very loose record of the interesting science things that she has learnt.  We often stick in pictures, diagrams of something that she has learnt about and sometimes she will draw a quick brain map of a few key words.

My son liked the idea of the flower picture so he took the answer page and coloured it in and stuck it into his own book.  (The first time he did this I was very tempted to print out a copy of the page that his sister was doing for him, but he explained to me that if he has the answer page, he can focus on reading the words and decorating it and not trying to get his writing to fit in so he enjoys it more.  And the slightly easier way of allowing him to do the activity – he is 2.5 years younger – means he sits for longer, joins in and he does actually take in the vocab and the facts so it works well for us).

The Two books I mentioned up top are these two

Flight of the Honey Bee (Nature Storybooks)

Bee Boy: Clash of the Killer Queens

My son is still reading Bee Boy but once he has finished it I will write a post on the book.

All links back to independent third-party websites and references to any subscriptions are correct at the time of writing this post. 

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