Carpenter Bee Math

We are having a blast with our bee week with our Bees and Butterflies unit from Mother Goose Time.  Down here in the south, the bees returned about a month and a half ago.  Because our yard is filled with azaleas in the spring, we have no shortage of bees in our yard.  In fact, the carpenter bees love our back porch, and every spring I can find some new holes drilled by them. Here's their latest handiwork which coincided perfectly with our carpenter bee day.

Did you know carpenter bees drill holes with their mandibles (mouth parts)?

Me either!  Thank goodness for my MGT teacher guide for that tidbit of knowledge!  After telling Avaleigh this fact, we went outside to check out the post, home to our newest tennent.

Look at that mess he made...yeah I have no clue what that squiggly stuff is, but I have some guesses.

After Avaleigh and I inspected the hole, we went inside to play our Egg in the Hole math game.

The whole reason carpenter bees drill these holes is so they can form tunnels which provide a safe place for them to lay their eggs.

To play Egg in the Hole we used our pocket cube, number cards (I just inserted random numbers, but was sure to include our numbers of the month which are 15 and 16), playdough, and some bee pencil toppers that my girl won in her Easter egg hunt the other day.  Our teacher guide suggested using grains of rice as the eggs that would be placed in the hole; however, I didn't want to ruin our playdough, so we just did not use rice, but you totally could!

Before starting our game, we just had to play with the playdough!

Squishing it, flattening it out, and "drilling holes" in the playdough is always good fun!

Avaleigh then would roll the number cube and using her bee, she would drill that many holes into her playdough.  Then she rolled again and placed that many holes in her blue playdough.  Then she added the 2 together by counting all the holes her little bee placed into the playdough!

She found that if she used her bee's bottom to stamp the holes, it actually left a little "egg" in the hole!  Once she finished adding the two , she would ball up and flatten out her dough ready for the next roll.  She had a blast with this game. It was great practice at adding numbers and larger numbers at that!

Next week we will study butterflies with our MGT stuff, but we did get a head start by buying some caterpillars who have already made their chrysalis!  In fact, they all started shaking when I transported them to our butterfly habitat! Check that out below 

Be sure to check back in with us as we learn about butterflies!