What’s a bug-themed week without our favorite buzzing friends—bumblebees?! I kicked off our week with engaging, hands-on bumblebee activities, and my little learners absolutely loved them! These two sensory-rich, buzz-worthy activities kept them engaged while building fine motor and early math skills.

Pin It! Don't forget to save this this blog for later! You don't want to forget about the BEST spring themed activities for your preK classroom!

Activity #1: Hungry Bumble Bee Sensory Bin

Setting Up the Bee Sensory Bin

Creating this sensory bin is simple and so much fun! Here’s what you’ll need:

• Two sensory bins

• Water

• Yellow food coloring

• Ice trays (these look just like honeycombs!)

• Turkey baster or droppers

• Artificial flowers (optional, but great for visuals!)

Before starting, I printed and laminated my real-world visual, How Bees Make Honey (from my Bug Week lesson plans), to introduce the activity and spark curiosity.

How It Works

In one sensory bin, I dyed the water yellow to represent nectar. The kids used turkey basters to transfer the nectar from the flower bin to the ice tray honeycombs. They loved experimenting with how much liquid they could move without overflowing their beehives—perfect for developing early pouring and measurement skills!

Using the turkey baster was also an incredible fine motor workout! One of my toddlers struggled at first, but by the end, she had mastered squeezing the top, holding the water, and carefully transferring it into the ice trays.

Extend the Learning

Once kids got the hang of transferring the liquid, I introduced counting cards. Each card featured a ten frame with a number (1-20), guiding them to transfer the correct number of drops to the hive. This was a fantastic way to integrate early math skills while keeping the activity engaging and hands-on!

Activity #2: Build a Beehive

Setting Up the Beehive Activity

This activity focuses on hexagon shapes while reinforcing what we learned about bees. Here’s what I used:

• Sorting tray (a classroom favorite!)

• Honeycomb cereal

• Counting cards

• Play-doh

• Toy bees and black-and-yellow pipe cleaners (optional but fun!)

How It Works

I started by modeling how to flatten the play-doh to create the base of our beehive. Then, we picked a Build It card and used the honeycomb cereal to form the hexagon shape. Once the kids got started, they were fully engaged, making their hives and pretending to fly toy bees from hive to hive!

Not only was this a fun way to reinforce shape recognition, but rolling the play-doh and arranging the small cereal pieces gave their fine motor skills a great workout.

Pro Tip: Don’t save the play-doh after it’s been mixed with cereal crumbs—it gets sticky and gross fast!

One tip I will pass on (since I have learned the hard way) is not to keep the play-doh around once it has gotten sugary cereal crumbs on it. It gets pretty gross.

Bring the Learning Home!

Want to make Bug Week extra fun? All the printables, instructions, and book recommendations for these activities (and more!) can be found in my Bug Week lesson plans. With five days of engaging, hands-on activities, your preschoolers will be buzzing with excitement all week long!

If you want to see my activities in action make sure you are following me on Tik Tok or Instagram, where I regularly post videos of what we get up to in my classroom!