As part of my Montessori certification, I am completing a unit on the honeybee. I have many fun activities up my sleeve coming soon. In the meantime, revisit a few Montessori inspired honey bee works in this post and enjoy these free parts of the honey bee nomenclature cards. Simply print out the document, use a red colored pencil to highlight the part of the honey bee, cut out and laminate.
Learn about Parts of the Honey Bee
Parts of the Honeybee Material
Preschoolers are so concrete so I like to use a lot of props and replicas. These materials always seem to engage them in the activity a bit more. For example, Safari’s Incredible Creatures Honeybee is great to get in the hands of young children. I use this replica with the cards to point out the parts of the bee. I also like to place Gentle Revolution’s 11 x 11 Bit of Intelligence image of the bee nearby so the children can get a good look at the details of the insect. The image is a bumblebee but still highlights the parts very effectively. You can see in the picture below our sweet little life sciences shelves. I have the large honey bee and the life cycle of the honey bee for the children to explore while the Bit of Intelligence card is on the next shelf for my boys to discover.
Along with the honey bee nomenclature cards, I have cards to match to the life cycle of the honey bee. Lucky for us, Safari has a wonderful Life Cycle of a Honey Bee Model for our work. I wish I cold find the file of the life cycle images I used for the matching but alas I can’t seem to locate them. So, go search on google. There are plenty of wonderful images to use for the cards. If that doesn’t work for you, this Etsy shop has a nice little set of honey bee life cycle cards. It is a great language, life sciences and history lesson for children. I talk about how long each stage takes the bee to develop (3 days for the egg, 4-5 days for the larvae and so on).
