Bee Study

Talia's insect of choice yesterday was the Bee. We read two books about bees, and then made a paper Bee similar to the ladybug she made the other day.

This time I let her make more choices and do more of the work on her own.

Observations:

She liked being "the cutting person" :)
She wanted me to help her with gluing a few of the things, but seemed to enjoy doing it herself as well.

Note the long tongue for drinking nectar (it is not a stinger-and did you know only females have stingers?) It was good to let Talia do the cutting because not only did she enjoy cutting, but we were able to discuss how many legs we needed, how big the tongue should be, how many wings a bee has, etc.

Ladybug Study

Yesterday I took Talia to the library in search of bug books (her topic of choice). We came home with an armful of books plus the Paper Bag Princess movie.

I'm going to see if we can get to the library as often as once a week, and choose different topics to find books for, each time. This way we can have a "topic of the week" to focus on.

Today she chose the Ladybug book and we read it together. I was impressed with how much she learned from it when we reviewed it. The plan is to teach Daddy all about ladybugs later (the babies are called Larva, the children are called Pupa, their feelers smell, in the winter they sleep, etc.)

I've already noticed this blog being helpful to my own motivation to do more with Talia. After we read the book, I thought to myself, "well that was a good, educational thing to do with her... too bad I don't have a picture to share it on the blog." And then I thought of something that I could post a picture of, and the idea of an activity to do with her, related to our Ladybug study, came to mind.

So, I prepared some pieces of lady bug out of construction paper, and she put it together. It allowed us to review again about the the different parts of the ladybug's body.

This next photo demonstrates her idea to bend the legs so that the ladybug could crawl :)



Things I Would Change:

I would probably let Talia cut out the dots, legs, etc. next time so that she could do more of it herself. I think she enjoyed doing it a lot, but I want always to reinforce her own creativity and abilities. It would probably be more of a "thinking" activity for her, if I had discussed with her about "what else does the Ladybug need?" for example, and helped her figure out how to make it.