Students Learn about Bees through Firsthand Experience
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Alice Fong Yu K-8 in San Francisco partnered with Planet Bee Foundation to place and maintain a live bee hive in their living schoolyard! Kindergarten and first graders enjoyed observing a frame from the school’s bee hive and had fun identifying the different parts of dead bees.
Then they learned the basics of pollination through a fun game: each student received a pipe cleaner bee and then searched the garden for flowers to pollinate. After finding a flower their pipe cleaner “bees” were covered in pollen and they returned to their “bee hive” (egg carton) to deposit the pollen into cells. Third and fifth graders also looked at the hive and learned more about the honey bee life cycle.
And lastly, the middle school Green Club students extracted honey from the frames. They scraped off the wax and then strained the honey over the weekend. They put the honey in jars and had enough honey for every student to take one home.
Learn more on Education Outside’s Alice Fong Yu School Blog
Contributed by Rachel Pringle, Senior Director of Programs, Education Outside.
Photos by Education Outside Corps Member, Kristin Owyang
San Francisco, CA
Green Schoolyards America is proud to feature Living Schoolyard Month celebrations that were held in May across the state of California. If you celebrated and would like to be featured here, send photos and a brief description to info (at) greenschoolyards (dot) org. —GSA