Bugs, Bees, & Bears – Oh My!

I got all of the “ingredients” for the bug sensory/discovery bin at the Dollar Store!!  I love the Dollar Store for sensory bins!  I bought 4 packs of brown paper shreds, 4 packs of bugs, 2 bug kits and a magnifying glass.  The bug kits were great because they also came with a net and tweezers.  The tweezers were great because they helped make this bin ALSO become a fine motor skill that the kiddos LOVED!

Here’s the completed bin.

 

Here are some of my little darlings using the tweezers to pick up the bugs and put them inside the bug collector kit.  I let only 2 students at a time use the bin.

 

Of course, we continued on to letter Bb in our ABC Interactive Notebook.  I haven’t done a post about these books all by themselves yet…but that’s coming soon. They are AMAZING.  Can’t wait to share it all with you.  This page shows our letter sort and sound sort.

This is the inside flap of the uppercase B letter sort.

Here’s the page in our interactive notebook where they had to find and stamp the letter Bb. We used a bingo stamper from the Dollar Store.  They also had to rainbow write the letter.

 

This is the uppercase B craft and tracing/writing practice that we did last week.  The wings are made out of parchment paper and we didn’t glue them completely down, so they look like they’re flying!

This is one of my kiddos working on the lowercase b craft and fine motor activity for the week.  We glued different color and shape buttons to a lowercase b.

I think it came out so cute!

 

This week we also learned about beavers.  We had been learning about different types of homes that people live in.  So when we read about how beavers build their homes, we created a Venn Diagram to compare how people and beavers build their homes.  We went on a scavenger hunt outside to collect our items (except the toothpicks that are representing wood).  People use leaves, mud/dirt, grass, wood and rocks.  Beavers use wood, sticks and mud/dirt.  So, we put mud/dirt and wood in the middle because both beavers and people have that item in common.  It was a GREAT introductory learning activity to Venn Diagrams.  Finding and gluing real items onto the diagram really helped the students to understand what we were trying to learn.

 

We also practiced our tracing and writing skills for the letter B.  I didn’t take a pic of my kids tracing in action…but still wanted to share what we did to practice the letter.  I just finished turning this into a printable pack too!  It has all letters A to Z with an animal on each page to match the letter.  You can grab your copy by clicking on the picture.  🙂