From Funerals to Mating - What a Week!!!!

We had a good time with Busy Buzzy Bee this week.  I have so many great nonfiction stories about bees, but realized this week was really lacking in fiction.  I am going to buy more fictional bee stories before this time next year.  On Tuesday, my kids spotted a bee on the playground.  I am such a dedicated teacher that I captured it in a jar!  I made my kids tell me "Thank you for risking your own safety for our education, Mrs. Morrison."  Having the power can be so much fun!  :)  We checked out that bee, but the next day it was dead.  The kids were a bit sad, but it turned out to be great.  With the bee dead, we were able to look at it with a magnifying glass. 


After we checked it out, someone suggested we have a funeral for the bee.  Sounded like a good time to me!  We made a little headstone and buried it outside of our classroom.  We took a moment of silence to remember all the bee taught us - like bees have furry bodies and four wings.  We placed a purple flower on the grave because these were her favorite.  It was pretty fun! 



My current author study is Doreen Cronin.  My kids loved Diary of a Spider, Fly, and Worm.  I had them write their own story called "Diary of a Bee".  Some of them turned out so cute.  Our story tells about how the queen bee mates with all the drones.  I felt so lucky that nobody even asked about mating this year.  As I was looking at their stories I found a most disturbing diary entry "Today I mated with my mom."  Oh goodness!!!  Does anybody else have to deal with mating questions in first grade?  How do you reply?

A New Blog and Busy Buzzy Bees

When I started my blog in November, I actually made two blogs - one dedicated to Harcourt Trophies reading series and another dedicated to everything else "Primary Techie".  I will now be using this blog solely for Harcourt Trophies reading.  If you do not use this series or no longer want to follow this blog, please follow my other blog at primarytechie.blogspot.com. 

This week my class will be reading "Busy Buzzy Bee".  I just love this story (except for the mating part!)  This is such a great story because of the photographs.  Those grubs look so gross!  We will be doing lots of fun bee projects.  I read a good idea at F is for First Grade's blog.  They cut our bee shapes and glued them on popsicle sticks with a cotton ball glued to the bottom.  They then made "Flowers" out of cupcake liners and put yellow cake mix in them for pollen.  The bees flew from flower to flower.  The pollen stuck to the cotton balls so kids could see how bees spread flower pollen.  My class is going to do this for sure.  I will take pictures and let you know how it goes. 


I have some fun bee themed activities in my TpT store.  We will do Busy Bee Handwriting this week.  I also have some fun bee Watch, Think, Color games. 

I have also created a phonics coloring sheet that you can download for free.  It focuses on the long o sound (since that is the sound we will be working on this week). 



Check out the literacy stations that correlate with our story this week.  Do you have any fun bee ideas to share?  I hope everybody has a very buzzzzzy week!