Today we recognize our appreciation for the environment and share our thoughts with how we can keep the Earth healthy and clean. Let’s observe, exercise civility, and celebrate Mother Nature. Rather than create and craft for our benefit, let’s honor our planet and give back to her. In order for your honeybee to truly appreciate nature, they must experience it. Let’s get outside!
Outdoor play in an unstructured environment has physical, empathetic, and cognitive benefits. We have adapted to a modern-world with stimuli from our ever-changing technical devices. Sitting for a long period of time and receiving solely simulated information may limit critical thinking and experimentation. Access to nature promotes observation, abstract questioning, and physical research. When exploring the great outdoors, your honeybee has new terrain to access risk and can test their own physical endurance.
Nature also engages your honeybee with living-things beyond themselves. Hands-on exposure to insects, plants, and animals promotes an understanding of what living-things need in order to survive. Establishing a positive connection between themselves and other living organisms creates empathy for our environment.
Here are a few activities to get outside and celebrate nature:
Nature Art
This unstructured style of art allows your honeybee to interact meaningfully with their natural environment. Let your honeybee find inspiration through their senses and allow nature to be their motif. Like nature, art is limitless. Your honeybee could paint with mud on your driveway or create a still-life portrait with acorns, leaves, and flowers. When combining art with nature, your honeybee has the opportunity think freely, approach their emotions, and express their ideas in inventive ways.
Nature Scavenger Hunt
Flex your honeybees’ executive function, critical thinking, and task initiation as they adventure into the great outdoors! Whether you accompany them through the woods, or send them into your backyard, this activity allows your honeybee to explore nature using their visual discrimination skills and senses. Create a check-list of items to spot and have your honeybee check them off as they go!
Observation Station
Create binoculars out of toilet paper rolls. Explain that you are making this important scientific tool from recycled trash. Recycling is when we take an item that we no longer need and turn it into something useful. When we recycle, we help save our natural resources, like our trees. Glue two toilet paper rolls together, cover with construction paper, and decorate to your liking. Add string to the ends so your honeybee can hang their binoculars around their neck.
Establish an “observation station” outside with your honeybee. Perhaps a blanket under a shaded tree or a chair by a brook. Sit silently and let your honeybee use their senses to connect with nature. Use the binoculars to observe the sky, the trees, or the hills far into the distance. Discuss your findings or record in a journal, but always take gratitude in your experience.
BEE kind to our planet!
The Busy B 