The Letter B

The boys were busy busy bees this week as we learned all about the letter B! There were so many fun options for the letter B this week: balls, boats, bunnies and more! But we decided to focus on brown bears, bugs, and bananas, with a few extras thrown in for fun. If you know Henry at all, you know that his favorite stuffed animal is Brown Bear.

We can't go anywhere without beloved Brown Bear, so our very first craft of the week was to turn the letter B into a Brown Bear.

Will didn't want to make a brown bear at first and insisted on a polar bear. Then he changed his mind, so that's why he has a two-toned bear.

They turned out really cute!

We also read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr. and then visited the bears at the zoo. One of the grizzly bears was cooling off in the water. The boys thought that was pretty fun to see him just sitting there. At home, we practiced some math skills with chocolate Teddy Grahams (brown bears!).I made some addition sheets for Will. All he had to do was put the correct number of bears in each circle and then add them up and write the answer on his page.He thought it was the greatest thing ever! Plus, he got to munch on some bears as he worked! I had Henry practice counting by just putting the right number of bears in each circle.

We also saw fruit bats eating bananas at the zoo, so at home we read Stellaluna by Janell Cannon and made our own hand-print bats at home. It was also the perfect craft leading up to Halloween!
One afternoon we went outside for some bubble painting. I mixed some paint into bubble solution. Then we blew bubbles in the cups and pressed the paper onto the bubbles to make designs.

Here is Henry's completed bubble painting.

We also made B's into bumblebees and read books about bugs. One of our favorites is The Bugliest Bug by Carol Diggory Shields.

Cute, right?

On Thursday, Pop took the boys on a bug hunt in the backyard. They were supposed to find different bugs and mark them down in their science journals, but Will got a little side-tracked because he wanted to find all the bugs in the exact order I had drawn them in the journal.

They did manage to find one dragonfly and one dead bumblebee, but it was not a very buggy day (surprisingly) in Houston!
At the end of the week, we turned to bananas. We started by reading Once Upon a Banana by Jennifer Armstrong. It is a funny story about bananas and it also teaches cause and effect! Next we watched an episode of Sid The Science Kid. Sid was curious about why his banana turned brown and mushy, so while Henry was napping on Friday, Will and I conducted our own banana study! We got out green, yellow and brown bananas and Will did a great job comparing and contrasting the three bananas.
We felt each banana, then peeled them, smelled them, and tasted each one. Will discovered that peeling the green banana was much harder than peeling the other two!
Will drew pictures of the bananas in his science journal and then he described each banana to me and I wrote down what he said about each one. He was very descriptive and loved showing Daddy his journal!
Will decided the yellow banana was the best one to eat, so he ate it all up. We put the green one in the fridge to see if it will ripen more and turned the brown banana into banana bread! Will mashed the bananas all by himself. The boys are getting really really good at helping me in the kitchen!
After making banana bread, the boys worked on their banana b craft. We had a great time with our B week!