Toddler Tuesdays: Bees

 Hello, thanks for joining us again. This week we have a lot of black and yellow around the house. I'm talking about Bees! Our sensory bin is full of wild rice (I was going to use honeycomb shaped pasta, but could not find any safe for Panda), sparkly yellow pom poms, a bumble bee or two, a beehive (I'll have instructions on how to make that later), tweezers, and a tube for pouring things through. 

 This was a new activity. I had Panda suck up nectar (colored water) with a turkey baster and put it into the honeycombs (ice cube tray). He did surprisingly good, There were of course some spills, but he caught on to the turkey baster right away and loved it. 

 I scavenged the spice jar from last week and used the other side of the cap. Panda had to stuff yellow and black pipe cleaners through the holes. While he usually focuses real well on activities on like this he kind of had a been there done that attitude with this activity yesterday. Of course it was a holiday and having Poppy home was a huge distraction. Sunday he loved this activity.

 Panda ignored the tweezers for this activity since we've done activities like this in the past without them. Then about halfway through he found the tweezers and tried real hard to use them to sort the pollen balls (pom poms). I call it a success.

 I got the idea for these adorable pool noodle bees from this blog. I added felt wings and googly eyes, but the credit is all hers.

Instead of having Panda go up and down the stairs with them like she suggested, I hooked them up outside and Panda LOVED running them back and forth. This might stay up longer than this week out there.

Last of all I had to post this cute garland I made. It will stay up for the rest of summer. Next year I plan to hang them outside in the trees. Maybe we will get lucky and birds will use them for nests. I got the idea from the local grocery store. They made their bees with large coffee cans. I fell in love with their cuteness and down scaled it to soup cans. We have other fun things planned for this week, like Panda's first taste of honeycomb, a trip to the nature center to see the glass wall with a real beehive inside, printing honeycombs using half an okra for a stamp, and even a craft making honeycombs with bubble wrap and paint! There is a buzzy crazzy week ahead of us. Please keep us in your thoughts. Hopefully things will start to slow down after this week. Fingers crossed. I can at last see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Have a blessed week and shine on!