GRASSHOPPER

We found a grasshopper the other day! I caught it and put it in a jar so the boys could study it up close. Ethan loved the lesson because he is fascinated with bugs!! Here are some photos:

ALL ABOUT BEES

The other day, Nikki and I were browsing through an encyclopedia. Actually, that encyclopedia belonged to me and my siblings and I just thought that it would be nice to show him some of the pictures in it. There were a lot of texts but all we studied together were the photos and the captions. Once particular topic caught his interest. It was about bees. So excitedly, I told him all about bees based on the pictures and the captions in the book. Here are some of the photos:


Here, Nikki learned about the queen bee (she's a girl -he still can't grasp "female"-, that she lays eggs and that she's the biggest bee in the hive), the drone (he's a boy and is the queen's partner), and the worker bee (also a female, takes care of the queen and the hive, and gathers nectar from the flowers to make honey).




Parts of the bee. Of course we did not get into too much detail. I just told him to read the words and to take note of the 6 legs that makes bees insects. But so far, Nikki already knows everything here except the pollen basket, the abdomen, and the thorax. We'll get back to this next time.






Nikki already knows his shapes so he was fascinated when he learned that the honeycombs were hexagonal.














Discussed this in passing. I just showed him that bees come from eggs and how they grow.








A photo of a bee visiting a flower.

And to end the lesson, we sang a song from his sing-along book: Buzz, Buzz, Buzz. Ruther got him (and Ethan) this book when we were in Japan. I was really happy with the lesson and as far as I could tell, so was Nikki. =D

SPIDER

We found this little spider after I showered the boys one evening. It was hiding behind the bottles of body wash and I only noticed it because it moved a bit. When I saw it, I showed it to Nikki and Ethan. Of course, they were fascinated. Then I realized that it was a perfect learning tool. So then and there, we reviewed about spiders. Nikki already knows that insects have 6 legs and since the spider has 8, it's not an insect. Since he could not pronounce arachnid perfectly, I let it go and just told him that the spider belonged to a different group entirely. I let them look at the spider closely and see the different lengths of its legs, the coloring, the size, and how different it looked from other bugs. I also told Nikki that spiders eat insects and bugs but bigger spiders eat bigger animals like frogs and such. And with that, our short lesson on spiders ended. Thankfully, the spiders in the Philippines are not poisonous. Just creepy. =D

NIKKI AND A BEE

Nikki found this bee in their pool one morning. When he scooped it up in his cup, it was an instant lesson on bees. I let him look closely at the wings, the coloring and the size of the bee. He paid attention but after dumping the bee outside the pool, he went back to playing in the water. =D Oh well...