How to Make a Bee Themed Number Matching Game

My son loves bees. He asked for a bee party for his third birthday and is always trying to get the honey bees in our yard to land on his hand. So when I saw this project from Sugar Aunts, I knew K would love something similar.

My bees are a little different that Sugar Aunts' - mine are on the pinching end of the clothespins instead of the gripping end. I also made a big fat queen bee.

Go check out Sugar Aunts' post for more fun activities you can do with these bees!

Supplies

Clothespins
Yellow and black chenille stems
Wire cutters
Googley eyes
Large yellow pom-pom (for queen bee)
Hot glue or quick grab glue
Wax paper
Scissors
Scrap cardboard (I cut up an old gift box that was in our recycling bin)
Permanent marker

Directions

Step 1: Make Worker Bees

Hold one yellow and one black chenille stem together and wrap them around one of the clothespin pinchers. Trim off excess. Add googley eyes and small pieces of black chenille stem to be antenna and a stinger. Cut small wing shapes from wax paper and adhere to the middle of their backs. (If you're having a hard time following along, Sugar Aunts has great pictures of their progress. Check them out here)

Step 2: Make Queen Bee

Get a black chenille stem and wrap it around the large yellow pom-pom. Add googley eyes and small pieces of chenile stem to be antenna and a stinger if desired. Add wax paper wings as for worker bees. Glue to top of a clothespin.

Step 3: Make number cards

These don't need to be fancy. I just got an old giftbox out of our recycling bin and cut it up it to make the flash cards using a permanent marker. I numbered cards 1-10. I also added dots under each number to correspond to how many items the number represented.

Step 4: How to Play with Cards and Bees

There are a few ways to play with these bees and cards. Here are some things we did with them. If you have more ideas for learning games to play with these, please leave a note in the comments!

Go through the flash cards in numerical order together, helping your child name the numbers if needed. If they get stuck recognizing a number, help them count the dots under the number to discover its name.
Go through the flashcards in random order. Help them as needed to name the numbers. Help them utilize the counting dots underneath to discover the number's name.
Count all the bees.
Sort the bees into piles of same and different (this, of course, only works if you made some bees different like I did!)
Use the bees like puppets to talk about what bees do. How do they pollinate flowers? Communicate with each other? Gather nectar?
Clip bees on number cards to correspond to number on card (clip 2 bees to the number 2 card).
Do bee math. Set out cards in a math equation (you may need to make additional equation marks cards)...2+3=5 for example. Clip 2 bees to the 2 card, 3 bees to the three card. Move all the bees to the 5 card and count them together.