B is for Bee – Letter of the Week for Preschoolers

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This past week we continued to work through the All About Reading, Pre-reading program and we focused on uppercase “B” with a lot of supplemental bee activities.  The program is intended for the girls (age 3) but since Snootz likes to do the activities I am including him in everything.

To start our week I put together a basket of bee books.  There were a handful that got looked at and read but overall the books weren’t as big of a hit as the alligator books last week.  The three bee books that our children enjoyed the most were Bee & Me (this is an animotion book and it is really neat – I highly recommend it), The Magic School Bus: Inside a Beehive and The Bee Tree by Patricia Polacco.  In the basket I also included a Cabbage Patch Kids bee and a honey bee flash card from this set.

Ziggy the Zebra made a couple of appearances during the week.  He is a very silly and funny little zebra.  Just ask the kids. 🙂

The girls completed all parts of the program for uppercase “B”, including the activity sheet with eraser tip painting (representing blueberries).

 

 

I added some additional activities to complement the program as well.

While we work through the uppercase letters you will notice that most of the supplemental activities I have chosen revolve around the animal or insect whose name starts with the letter of the week, rather than the letter itself.  That is because the girls already know the letters of the alphabet, especially uppercase letters, and are quite comfortable with identification.  I am simply reinforcing what they know, putting more emphasis on teaching the sounds of the letters, and then teaching them about the animal or insect for that week.

I plan to do some letter construction and other letter-based activities as we continue with the program so you will see that in future weeks.

We watched an orchestra play Flight of the Bumblebee, a musical piece by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, on YouTube.

The children were enthralled by this and wanted to watch it several times.  They recognized the music from one of their Little Einsteins DVDs but they also loved watching the orchestra play and then pointing out the different instruments.  I was a little surprised that all three children were so into it; that doesn’t always happen.

We also did the Here is the Beehive fingerplay from Wee Sing Children’s Songs and Fingerplays.

And the children used watercolors to paint an Eric Carle bee drawing.  The page is from an Eric Carle coloring and painting book called Color My World.

 

And, of course, they made plaster of paris buzzing bees.

I am looking forward to this week as we begin “C” is for Cat!