A Buzz in the Butterfly Classroom!

Welcome back to the butterfly blog.

We hope that you all had a restful half term and that your butterflies have enjoyed being back in the classroom.

It is very scary to think that this is our last half term before the summer holidays! It's going to be packed full of wonderful things and should be very exciting for us all!

We spent a lot of time in our garden this week, where something has been growing.

The beans that we planted have become sprouts, and have peeked their heads up from under the soil.

The lovely sunshine we've had has helped them grow. Is anything growing in your garden? 

We have been carrying on our topic about mini beasts by having a close look at bees.

We worked together to make a hive, using our fine motor skills to fold paper and rip masking tape. It looked fantastic! We have put it up on the wall on our new bee display. Be sure to look for it on Monday!

We learnt how bees and flowers help each other, and how important bees are to the natural world. We got busy making our own colourful flowers, making sure we were folding our paper in half to get the result we wanted.

Miss Whitelock taught us what she knew about bees and pollen, but there were still a lot of things to find out. Luckily an expert was coming to visit later in the week! We wrote all of our questions down and put them in a book to show her.

The water in the water tray had been magically changed to honey! We had great fun filling up the 'honey comb'!

We found out that bees in a hive work together as a big team, sharing the work and following the queen's orders. the butterflies became bees outside and worked together to do some building.

Once the job was done, they decided they didn't want any people coming in and ruining their hive! The children wrote signs warning people to stay away if they didn't want to get stung. It was such a fun idea and the children really enjoyed thinking up silly messages to write.

The children have really loved being outdoor this week. It has given them a boost of energy. These two quiet careful butterflies even made a mud pie, covering themselves in mud to their elbows! We were very proud of them for trying something so new! Well done.

Then it was time for a special visitor.. she looked a bit strange! Ms Tregoning came from the Leicestershire and Rutland Beekeepers association and had brought all kinds of wonderful things with her.

Can you tell your grown up why did she need such a special suit?

We learnt about the smoker, which calms the bees and sends them down into the hive when a bee keeper wants to peek inside.

We even got to see an empty hive! 

We were very excited to learn there was more than one thing called 'foundation' when we were shown the wax foundation that Ms Tregoning used to help the bees build their hive.

Then we saw a bit of hive that bees had made!

It was amazing, and smelt really rich. 

We even got to taste some local honey, which can do all sorts of wonderful things! We learnt if you have hay fever or allergies, local honey can stop you feeling poorly.

We thought it tasted sweet and smelt of flowers.

Yum yum!

We sat so beautifully, and really paid attention. All the grown ups were very proud! So we went outside to play a running game.

Too many bees in this hive!

We used the local honey that was very kindly given to us to make some delicious honey biscuits. We hope that you enjoyed them, Miss Whitelock thought they were lovely when she gobbled up the left overs!

The children have been fascinated by bees for a while, so it was a really wonderful week for them. We hope that they have brought home lots of facts.

We have been singing "I found a baby bee" much to the children's delight, even if it does teach us a rather different message to the one we've learnt this week!

You may have noticed this table on Friday, which had left over sheets from the week. We will put the table out every Friday, with anything that we did not have a chance to use in the week. Please feel free to take what you would like to work on with your butterfly.

Next week will be international week! It means that our time table will be slightly different from normal, so if you were planning on visiting for phonics or maths, please check with your child's teacher on the day to make sure it will happen at the regular time. 

We will not be swimming this Friday because it will be our special 'father's day' celebration. Please make sure you have bought a slip back saying if you would like to attend or not. Invitations are not restricted just to Dads; Uncles, older brothers, Grandads... any man who is special to your butterfly may come!

That's all for now. Goodbye and toodle-oo!