Community: The Ladybugs Visit a Community Garden

The Ladybugs have been talking about the different ways people can participate in their community. Zara's dad, Khem, invited us to see his community garden. This morning, the Ladybugs took a small trip to the 100 Quincy Street community garden in Bed Stuy. They got to smell, taste and touch different vegetables in the garden and visited the 5 chickens in the chicken coop. They even got to pet a chicken!

Community Service: The Bees Study Bees!

For the Bee's yearlong community service focus, the Bumblebees will be exploring the endangered honeybee. To launch the study they had a bee farmer come in today to tell them all about the honeybee. they learned about honeybees. Here is some of what they learned:

• There is a Queen Bee (female), the worker bees (females) and the drone (male).
• The honeybee has 4 wings, many legs, 3 eyes (it's third eye is located on the top of its head and it helps it see in the dark!), and it is yellow and black. 
• They saw pictures of a Queen Bee and learned her job is to lay eggs. She can lay up to 1,000 eggs each day (very surprising as you can see from Josie's reaction)!! 
• The worker bees are the ones that look for nectar from flowers, which they turn into honey. 
• Farmer David gets his bees from another bee farmer in Florida. The bees are sent to him by mail in a crate. Since it is a long trip, the bees have to eat or they will starve. A can with sugary water is placed in this crate. The can has two little holes on the bottom where the bees use their long tongues to drink the water. 
• He also showed them where he keeps his bees (in trays inside a "super-" the blue and red box). They got see see and even touch one of the bee trays that had combs on it. 

David brought them real honey from his bee farm. They got to taste it - 2 thumbs up!!

 It felt "dry" and "sandy." It also "smell[ed] like honey." 

Community: :Ladybugs Build a Fort Together

Kicking off their Community unit for the month of November, the 2 year-old Ladybugs have been working together to paint their fort/house with paint brushes and rollers. Every morning they have been practicing sorting color objects into bins and mixing colors together to see what would happen.