Cruising along towards the last 2 weeks of school in senior kindergarten and we have just started an inquiry on bees. It came about when the wasps and bees and other flying things started to hover around the garden in the school yard. Students would scream and run, or spread rumours like, “I think it’s a yellow jacket.” “No, it’s a hornet. And if it stings you 3 times, you die.” Bugs were caught and squished as the Protector Instinct surfaced amongst a few students even while I tried to interrupt the squishing with reminders that, “True Nature Detectives are Observers NOT Disturbers!” To little avail.
So, we had a talk about wasps and how they are related to bees and that there are so many kinds of bees it can be hard to tell which is a bee and which is a wasp. The next day, I brought in a book of mine called “A Natural History of Bees”, and asked our wonderful school librarian if there were a few bee books I could take out to share with the students. As I started to read the books aloud, I was amazed at how focussed all the students were on learning the facts about bees. After reading one particular book, they started to mimic the circular dances bees do to communicate where a good supply of pollen and nectar can be found, and everyone started buzzing.
Back in the classroom, with only paper, markers and masking tape put out on the art table, self-conceived bee costumes began to take shape. At other tables, some students would pour over the photographs in the books, while others would start drawings of hives, bees, trees and flowers, and plasticine bees and hives were created. Perhaps the best question that came out of the inquiry was, “How do bees make honey?” I had no clue, so I read books with the class until we could answer the question. Essentially, a bee chews up pollen, then spits it into a cell in the hive. The wax they use to form the perfect hexagonal cells in the hive comes from sacs on their body and keeps the honey for the growing larvae to feed on. We learned, too, that a honey bee will work all their lives collecting pollen which amounts to about a teaspoon full of honey. Fascinating stuff. One little girl, however, wanted to clarify a fact when she asked, “Soooo, honey is really bee spit?” Yep!
To further their knowledge about bees in an interesting but unobtrusive way, I found a National Geographic video on bees that I projected onto the screen at one end of the classroom with the sound off. Students could walk by and stop and watch bees up close for a moment, then go on their way to whatever activity they had chosen.
For a math question, we imagined that our classroom was a beehive. I asked, “If this really were a hive, how many drones and how many worker bees would there be?” Having learned that drones are male and worker bees who collect pollen are female, the students had to come up with a way to count to find out how many of each kind of bee we had. They settled on the idea to have all the girls stand in one line and have a boy count them, and then have the boys all line up and have a girl count them. I asked why that might be a good idea, and they knew it was because you often forget to count yourself. They counted 13 worker bees and 13 drones.
After a few days of inquiry, I decided to read the book, “The Very Busy Bee” by Jack Tickle. While I was reading, I could tell that the students were a little disappointed to hear how it was not at all factual, as they started making comments like; “A boy bee doesn’t go out and collect nectar!” and “A bee can’t just eat pollen and not bring it back to the hive. They don’t eat it to get fat, they collect it for the hive.” These comments highlighted the knowledge that they had acquired from the inquiry, as well as their critical thinking skills, and their understanding of the difference between fiction and nonfiction stories. Report cards may be done, but ongoing inquiry in the classroom helps to keep the students focussed and makes it easier to continue to plan interesting activities – especially when it is the end of the school year.
