H is for Honey

It was a cold and drizzly fall day today, so a nice, warm HONEY day was perfect for preschool. We gathered up all of our honey books and settled in for a relaxed preschool day. I would recommend all of these books below. It’s a great mix of fun fiction and simple non-fiction with great pictures.

• Read “The Beeman” by Laurie Krebs, Illustrated by Melissa Iwai … there are two illustrated versions by the same author.
  1. I really liked the illustrations in this book. A simple, rhyming story telling how honey is made, from the flower to the jar!
  2. Be sure to point out the hexagon-shape of the honeycomb in the book.

• Exploring Hexagons
  1. Gather all the yellow hexagon shapes from a bucket of pattern blocks. We have this bucket here. I got these last year and the kids love building with them and designing pictures.
  2. Count the sides … hexagons have SIX sides.
  3. Show them a picture of a honeycomb in one of your books.
  4. Show the kids how to place them side by side to form a “honeycomb”
  5. NOTE: just fyi … if I was going to buy these blocks again, I would buy the wooden blocks here. They are thicker and the kids can build vertically with them without the blocks tipping over.

 

• Honeycomb Beehives … I loved this idea from Spark Preschool!
  1. Print a copy of the blank beehive above (click on the picture).
  2. Taste test a honeycomb cereal  
  3. Show the kids that the cereal also has six sides.
  4. Glue honeycomb cereal onto the hive.
  5. Add bee stickers! We didn’t have any, but they would have been cute.

• Stories & Honey Tasting … for the rest of our preschool, we just had a fun, relaxing and tasty storytime!
  1. Collect several flavors of honey sticks. The family farm just down the road from us sells honey sticks. I let my girls pick out several flavors to try. Mmmm! You can also order a honey stick mix from Amazon. They were 4/$1.00 at the family farm, so the Amazon price is not bad.  
  2. Choose a book to read and a honey stick to sample! Try to guess the flavor. We really enjoyed all of these books … and most of our honey stick flavors  

• Scones & Honey Butter … it is cold and drizzly outside, so this was the perfect warm and sweet snack today!
1. Make a batch of your favorite scones (cornbread would be yummy too!) I used our very simple, family recipe below.
2. Spread honey butter on your scones while they are still warm. An easy and delicious recipe here. I only made 1/4 of what the recipe called for and it was plenty. Enjoy!!