busy as a bee

I have not posted a school update for awhile, so I though I would share what we have been working on this week. Our current Konos unit is Orderliness and we have been studying animal classifications. We started with invertebrates and covered mollusks, coelenterates, porifera, annlida and arthopods... Did you know that of all the animals on the earth only 5% are vertebrates, the rest are invertebrates? Amazing! Anyway, we have taken a small detour from the regularly scheduled program that would have us moving on to mammals and and other creatures and have been doing some more in-depth bug research. This week we have been studying Honeybees (and we read a bit about Bumblebees just to clear up some confusion about how they differ and if they sting, which is of course the most important question, lol).

The kids and I really love doing lap books as it is a great way to record what we have learned and enables us to go back later and review, and I really love homeschoolshare.com because they have so many great, FREE lap book templates so it takes a lot of the organization and prep work away from me.

The two books on top were both excellent resources. I think Regan might have read one of the others, but the top two were so good we did not even bother reading the others together. Charles Micucci has other books too and they are well written with great illustrations (the Life Cycle book has real photos and I really enjoyed having both the photos and the illustrations).

I wanted to do something different from the typical file folder lap book, so I drew the hive on card stock and used book rings to hold it all together.

If you look closely you will notice out Bee Observation sheets are blank. Today is the first day this week it has not been raining, so we will be doing our observing this weekend :)
Next week we start butterflies. I've got my tent, just waiting for the larva to come in the mail!