Honey: Introductory activity ideas 7-11 years
Activities
Here is a set of activities provided as an introduction to learning about honey. The intention is to inspire children to want to learn more about how honey gets from the hive to our plates. The activities can all be done independently - you can pick and choose whichever is most appropriate or interesting for your purposes.
- Use the ‘Photo Pack’ and ‘Glossary of Terms’ to support learning and teaching throughout.
- Ensure parental/guardian permission has been sought prior to the tasting of any foods, and that you are aware of any existing food allergies. Note: Honey in any form is not suitable for babies under one year; honey may contain spores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum which can lead to infant botulism. (Advice from The Food Standards Agency)
What is honey?
- Show the children some honey or a picture of honey and ask them what it is made from. Establish that honey is made by bees using the nectar from flowering plants, and honey is what bees eat!
- Talk about whether they have tasted honey before, and how they may have eaten it.
- Taste and enjoy some honey!
- Use the ‘Yummy Honey Facts’ cards to learn a few interesting facts about honey. You may wish to make multiple sets of cards and laminate. Suggestions for use include:
- Make a bee hive and fill with ‘Yummy Honey Facts’ cards. Ask each child to pick a random card and share the facts with the rest of the class.
- Use as a model to create your own ‘Yummy Honey Facts’ cards. Find out some interesting facts about honey and share with the class as above.
- Ask the children, in groups, to create a card game using the cards. Create a box for the cards and a set of rules.
- Split the set(s) of cards into piles. Ask the children to read aloud the different facts to one another, e.g.: ‘Did you know that...’ Prepare a mini presentation of the facts to the rest of the class/group.
- Use the cards as the basis for a presentation,project, display etc.
- Alternatively, use the ‘Honey Riddle Cards’ to investigate facts about different honeys. You may wish to make multiple sets of cards and laminate. Suggestions for use include:
- Provide pairs or groups with a set of cards and set them the challenge of researching the answers between them. You may like to nominate one person in the group to be the Quiz Master – they can check the answers against the answer sheet. After your research, shuffle the cards and put into a container, e.g. a home-made hive! Take turns to draw a card and guess the riddle.
- Shuffle the cards and deal. In groups, take turns to guess each other’s card(s). The winner is the one with the most cards after five minutes. Alternatively, play with the whole class. Split children into teams. First team to press buzzer/ring bell with correct answer gains one point. Winning team is the one with the most points.
- Ask the children in groups to create their own set of Honey Riddle Cards and use to play against another team(s)/the whole class.
- To simplify the game, use only a small number of Honey Riddle Cards and provide ‘answer’ cards or a list of random answers on the whiteboard. Children select an answer from the selection provided.
- Hand out/ask the children to select at random one or more riddle cards. Research/taste the answer for a homework task and present the information back to the class.
Create a Honey/Honey Bee Mind Map
What is a bee?
- Ask the children what is a bee. Establish that bees are flying insects and their closest relatives in the insect world are wasps and ants. There are more than 20,000 species of bee in the world but only seven species can make honey!
- Share ‘What’s the Buzz?’. Use as a whole class
text or make multiple copies and share in groups. Use the
accompanying questions as an aid to discussion. Alternatively,
you may wish to ask the children to re-read the text and answer the accompanying questions independently or in pairs. Use as a model to create your own texts.
- Show them a ‘Labelled diagram of a honey bee (A)’ and talk about the different parts. Ask the children to label/draw their own diagram of a honey bee. Tie in with a bit of bee spotting and see if you can recognise and name some of the different parts. Alternatively, see if they can label the bee in pairs using the other template (B) provided.
The lifecycle of a bee
- Using the ‘Bee Detective’ poster chart as a guide, explain the three types of bee in a colony: queen bee; worker and drone and the different roles that they play within a colony. Honey bees live in a nest or in a man-made hive (colony) made by beekeepers, and inside each hive there is a queen bee. She is the mother of all the other bees in the hive and she lays as many as 2,000 eggs each day. The eggs that the Queen lays will become female worker bees, male drones or new queens. The role of the female worker bee is to do all the work in the hive - she looks after the queen, looks after the babies, cleans the hive and guards the entrance. The role of the male drone is to mate with the queen. In the warm summer months, the older worker bees spend a lot of time outside the hive collecting nectar. The bee wants to get the nectar to make honey.
- There are four basic stages to the development of a honey bee (egg, larva, pupa, adult), but the lifecycle from egg to emergence of the adult bee varies in length according to the type of bee (24 days for drones, 21 days for worker bees, 16 days for queens)
- Explore the ‘Development of a honey bee’.
Protecting bees
- As well as collecting nectar from plants to produce honey, Honey Bees are pollinators. Pollination occurs when pollen is transferred from the anther (male part of flower) to the stigma (female part of flower). Other pollinators include bumblebees, wasps, butterflies, spiders and flies. The Honey Bee is the world’s most important pollinator of food crops. Roughly, one third of what we eat is pollinated by bees. Many fruits and vegetables are pollinated by bees, and honeybees also pollinate alfafa and clover which is fed to cattle, which in turn feeds our meat and dairy industries.
- Bees are under threat and are declining in number. Talk about what can be done to protect the bees, e.g. plant bee- friendly plants at school/at home, invite local beekeepers into school and make a bee hotel etc. Even eating honey can help increase bee numbers by increasing the need for more beekeepers!
- Set up a school campaign ‘Save the Bees’, designing posters, stickers, fact sheets and tips.
- Ask the children to write a project/presentation guide on how to save the bees.
- Hold a school Mufti Day to raise awareness/funds to help save the bees. Alternatively, hold a ‘Bee Day’ and all come in dressed as bees. Serve honey-related dishes to teachers/parents.
- Hold a class debate on the topic of government funding – “this house believes that more government funds should be made available to create and support environments to encourage bees”.
- Alternatively, stage a ‘hive debate’, on the same principle as a balloon debate, but with children acting as bees arguing their case for being allowed into the hive.
- Watch the Bee Movie, Dreamworks Animation
Useful links