Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Summer Mini-Lesson: Pollinators


It started with my e-mail from the NWF. While, I strongly disagree with their position on global warming, I appreciate their children's magazines (Ranger Rick, Your Big Backyard, and Animal Baby), love the Green Hour website and blog, and enjoy all of the information on local wildlife and children's and family activities to help them.

So this e-mail informed me that this week is National Pollinators Week and listed five ways to help pollinators in my neighborhood:
  1. Use Native Plants


  2. Hang Hummingbird Feeders


  3. Build a Bee House


  4. Plant a Butterfly Garden


  5. Certify Your Yard With National Wildlife Federation


We'd just read books about bumble bees and honeybees last week. So today we read "Bad News for Bees" at Time for Kids. Brian's bringing home "A Honeybees Job" worksheet (our printer isn't working). The corresponding teacher guide has an additional worksheet as well.

Then we went to CBS and watched the video "Mystery of Disappearing Bees". We also checked out Haagan Daz's Help the Honeybees website. We then discussed the ways we could help, including the e-mail that started it all. We're planning to hang two hummingbird feeders tonight and soon buy some native plants to add to the butterfly garden.

We ended our mini-lesson with a fingerprint bumblebee craft. We stamped our bees on card stock, drew flower stems along the bottom, and added foam sticker flowers. Another option would be this cute Egg Carton Bumble Bee.

2 comments:

United Studies said...

Thanks for these links!

We, too, love all the magazines from NWF (just don't get me started on global warming....ack!), we've been subscribing to them since Emma was born.

Just this passed week we were sitting at my mom's house and watching all the bees gathering pollen from her flowers. She has a big garden and is actually certifying her backyard with the NWF. So Emma actually got to see honeybees in action.

Now I'm off to print some stuff...

Alicia said...

Yeah, we definitely have to edit a lot of their idea of "green". I think it's sad that such a well-known organization woul support such a scientifically unsubstantiated but politcally correct) view of global warming instead of offering factual information.