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In this episode, we are learning and exploring the amazing world of honey bees! Honey bees are super important for our ecosystem – they help pollinate plants so they can grow fruits and vegetables that we love to eat, not to mention the delicious honey they make. They communicate by dancing, and always work together to help the hive. Explore honey bees at home by recreating our classroom activities, and read on for tips and ideas on how to build off those activities for more learning.

Buzzing Bee Play

Caitie starts off this episode by pretending a bee is buzzing in the classroom, but it’s really only her hand and a buzzing sound she is making with her mouth. You can try this at home too and have some fun with it practicing different vocabulary words!

• Practice body part vocabulary by having the bee land on different parts of your body. Ask your little one where the bee is now and have them say the vocabulary word. Caitie does a version of this later in the episode before singing Here Is The Beehive.
• Practice positional vocabulary by asking questions about where the bee is in relation to other things: where is the bee now? It is under the pillow! Or it is beside the book!
• Practice hello and goodbye by bringing the bee in and then having it fly away.
• Little ones will love to see the pretend buzzing bee fly around, and they might like to make their own buzzing bee too. You can practice other vocabulary words by asking them to have the bee land on different objects, or even different colors to practice color vocabulary!

Honey Bees & Flowers

Honey bees love flowers! We can use colorful flowers and bees to practice color vocabulary and counting!

• Give your little one a few pieces of paper and have them draw a different colored flower on each one. You can do this as well and then give them to your little one. Place them on the floor and have your little one buzz around the room and land on the different colored flowers. Have them tell you the color of the flower, or ask them to go to a specific one!
• Try hiding the pictures of the flowers around the room. Have your little one buzz around the room and find all the flowers. Once all the flowers are found, bring them together to count!

Honey Bees & Nectar

The reason honey bees love flowers so much is because flowers have nectar, and honey bees need nectar to make their honey. They go around to different flowers collecting nectar and bring it back to the hive. In the classroom we explore this with a fun activity you can easily recreate at home.

• We cut out yellow and black foam paper to make a bee and glued it to the top of a large eye dropper. The one we used is from a bath toy kit! We also used test tubes and cut out flowers from foam paper with a hole in the middle to put on top of the test tubes. Each test tube was placed into a hole we cut into a piece of painted styrofoam. We filled each test tube with colored water that we dyed with food coloring. The bee travels to each flower to suck up the colored water into the eye dropper and brings it back to the hive. We used a silicone ice cube tray that we cut into the shape of a hexagon for our hive.
• You can recreate this activity using the same items we did, or use other items! The important thing is acting out the activity of the honey bee, and getting some great fine motor skill exercise in while we are at it! You can use cups of water with a flower placed in it or with a flower picture on the glass, or skip the flower and just use colored water! If you don’t have an eye dropper, you can even just practice pouring colored water from a glass with a picture of a flower on it to a glass with a beehive on it. If you are using different colored flowers, be sure to include lots of color vocabulary, like we did in the classroom. Mention the color of each flower and ask your little one which color flower the bee should go to next, or ask them what color flower the bee is at.
• If you are concerned about making a mess, this can be a great activity to introduce during bath time and using bath toys! Gather little bits of water from different areas of the bath, like a bee gathers nectar from different flowers, and pour it into one big bowl or glass that represents the beehive. Keep going until the bowl is full!

The Waggle Dance

Bees are so incredible that they communicate not by speaking, but by dancing! They do something called the waggle dance. Watch Caitie’s explanation of the waggle dance and try along with her. Try bringing the waggle dance to life with this fun activity:

• Play flower hide and seek, but give a hint to the flower’s hiding spot by waggle dancing! One person hides a picture of a flower somewhere in the room while the other person closes their eyes. Once the flower is hidden, the person who did the hiding much waggle dance in the direction of the hidden flower. See if the person doing the seeking can find the flower by watching the dance!

Visiting A Beehive

In the classroom, we take a field trip to an urban beehive. That means we saw a beehive in a city! The beehives we saw were on the rooftop of a hotel in Toronto, Canada. Our friend Madison from Alvéole taught us a lot of incredible things about bees and how they make honey! We even got to taste some, and we learned some interesting things about that too!

• Bees from different hives make different tasting honey. Even bees that are only a few minutes apart from each other will have different tasting honey because they gather nectar from different flowers. Try having a honey taste test! Get some different kinds of honey and see if you can taste a bit of a difference between them.

Here Is The Beehive

This is one of Caitie’s favorite songs! Sing along with Caitie and follow all the actions!

• Watch our animated music video for Here Is The Beehive.
• Watch Caitie’s live action music video of Here Is The Beehive.
• Find more ideas on how to use Here Is The Beehive at home and in the classroom with our How To Teach Series: Here Is The Beehive.

Color Match With Bees

Bees always return to their hive after their hard day of work. But the bees in the classroom are lost! Help Caitie return the bees to the right colored hive! You can recreate this activity easily at home, and try it a few other ways to practice more than just colors.

• To practice colors, make a few different colored bees. You can make them as fancy as you like, the important thing is the color. You can use cut out shapes of bees from construction paper, or even just colored pom poms and pretend they are bees. Then cut out some hexagon shapes from colored construction paper. Place them in front of your little one and have them match the bee with the right colored hive!
• You can also try matching letters and words! Try writing lower case letters on each bee, and write the uppercase letter on the hive and match letters! Try writing sight words on both the bees and the hive and have your little ones match them together. Put a different word family groups on each hive and words from those word family groups on the bees, then fly them to the right hive!
• You can also practice numbers! You can put a number on both the hives and the bees and have your little one match them. Or try putting a number on the hive but a different representation of the number on the bees, for example dots, like on a dice. You can also put a number on a hive and have your little ones put that amount of bees into that hive!

Create Your Own Beehive

Find the directions on how to make your own beehive and bee craft here!

• Try making different colored bees using different colored pom poms for other activities suggested here!

Let’s Pretend

With our book of pretending, we can pretend to be anything like! In this episode, we pretend to be busy buzzing bees.

• Encourage your little ones to close their eyes and listen to Caitie as she describes what you as a bee is doing. Can you imagine the pictures in your head?
• If sitting still and closing your eyes is tricky, encourage your little one to act out the scene as Caitie describes it and move to the music!
• Little ones might also be inspired to draw pictures of the scene from the Let’s Pretend book.
• Give your little one some props to act out the scene. Perhaps using a beehive and bee craft that they made!

We hope you have fun singing, playing, learning, and creating! We love to see photos of our friends having fun in the classroom and of their wonderful creations! You can share them with us through social media or by sending us an email to hello@SuperSimpleOnline.com.

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Doing The Skeleton Dance

The Skeleton Dance is a fun and danceable way to work on learning parts of the body. No “teaching” necessary. Just put the song on and go! It’s a great addition to Head Shoulders Knees And Toes, because it adds even more body parts like foot, leg, hip, and neck. You’ll work your way up the body and there’s a couple of dance steps that are sure to make kids giggle.

Classroom Activity – The Freeze Dance

Play The Skeleton Dance video or song, and sing and dance along. It’s really easy to follow. At some point during the song, stop the music. When the music stops, the kids should stop moving and freeze. Point to your knee and ask “What’s this?” After they answer correctly, start the music again. Continue dancing, freezing, and naming parts of the body.

Try the Freeze Dance at your Halloween Party!

Shake Your Hands to the Left

You can also use this song to work on left and right, concepts that can be a little tricky for kids to understand. Remember that when facing your students, your right is their left, and your left is their right! Use the video to help practice this one. If you get confused, it helps if you turn around and face the same direction as the kids.

Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle

How about making some masks or costumes to dress up before singing? This song works well at parent performances too. Check out these cute and easy costume ideas from MILK English in South Korea.

Follow it all up with some simple skeleton worksheets, and you’ve got parts of the body and left/right covered!

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“Moo, moo” says the cow! Cows are popular farm animals and one of our favorites. After all, that’s where delicious milk comes from. Did you know cows like to eat about 40lbs of grass and plants per day? That’s a lot! A baby cow is called a calf, a mommy cow is called a cow, and a daddy cow is called a bull. 

We made a super cute handprint cow craft to help little learners explore the farm in the classroom or homeschool. We hope you have fun down on the farm. Moo!

Things you’ll need

• Construction paper – several colors
• Craft paint – black 
• Cotton ball
• Googly eyes
• Markers
• Scissors
• Glue stick

First, trace your hand on a white piece of paper using a marker and add a tail shape near your little finger. You can also sketch out a head, snout and ears.

Next, stamp some black craft paint onto your hand to make realistic cow spots. Feel free to get creative and use different colors and sizes of spots! Why not?

While the paint dries, you can draw and cut out some grassy hills from green construction paper for your cow to roam on.

You can trace a bottle cap onto some yellow paper and cut out a sun. Add little triangles around the sun for some sparkling details.

Once the handprint is dry, cut out all of your cow shapes.

Assemble your lovely cow by sticking down all of the parts with some glue. A blue sheet of construction paper makes a nice sky, but you can use any color you choose.

Q: What did Mommy cow say to her baby calf? 
A: “It’s pasture bedtime!”

Check out Super Simple’s farm-themed ideas for learning at home!

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