Ready to celebrate the bees and spring? Our fun and engaging Honeycomb Sensory Activity is a great way to start exploring the world of bees while also providing unique sensory feedback to help your child thrive. Interesting supplies. Fun Activities. A unique smell. Taste-worthy ingredients. When playtime comes, what more could any child want?
If you aren’t sure why your child needs sensory play, read The Importance of Sensory Play for Children. It highlights all of the various developmental milestones directly impacted by sensory experience. It’s huge.
From fine motor skills to neural pathways to emotional regulation, sensory play builds up a child in all of the right ways. And it’s not a huge lift for the parent either. In fact, your child might get so engrossed in playtime you have a moment or two to breathe or a chance to fix a home-cooked meal (or ten) while they play at the kitchen counter.
You might have to put up with a little bit of mess every once in a while, but that’s a small price to pay. This type of play is a win for everyone, and we have so many ideas you will never run out.
How to Make A Honeycomb Sensory Activity
Supplies Needed
- Honeycomb Cereal
- Empty Toilet Paper Rolls
- Yellow Construction Paper
- Small Toy Bees
- Scoop or spoon
Step-By-Step Instructions
- Flatten the toilet paper roll and cut it into sections. You need at least 7.
- Shape each section into hexagons.
- Place the hexagons on the paper in a honeycomb shape.
- Let kids scoop the honeycomb cereal into the toilet paper roll honeycomb.
- Let them add bees to the honeycomb if they want to.
- Encourage kids to talk about the cereal’s feel, smell, and taste.
Tips to Assemble your Honeycomb Sensory Play Activity
- Use edible bees instead of toy bees for a fun treat. This is great for little ones who put everything in their mouth. We love this adorable option. This makes it a mostly taste-safe play experience as long as you can keep the cardboard out of their mouths.
- To easily shape the hexagons, take a flattened section. Move to a spot â…“ of the way across. The remaining section should be twice as big. Pinch each side there to form a rectangle. Then pinch the sides once more halfway across the long side of the rectangle.
- To form the big honeycomb, place one hexagon on the paper. Then, add hexagons so they touch each side of the first one all the way around. You should have a total of seven once you’re done.
Make Sensory Play Even More Valuable with These Tips
Provide tongs for little hands and encourage your child to pinch the tongs to move the honeycomb. This works a different set of hand muscles necessary for later skills like scissors and pencil grip. You can also encourage your child to pick up the honeycomb between thumb and forefinger to practice pincer grip.
Give your child a scoop or spoon so that he or she can work on hand-eye coordination and muscle coordination moving scoops of honeycomb into the hexagon shapes.
If your child has experience with scissors, you can have them help with the cutting and folding of the toilet paper tubes to make hexagons. Just remember to demonstrate (don’t just describe), go slowly, and allow imperfection. This will add one more layer of working on fine motor skills, following directions, and hand-eye coordination.
Ways to Extend This Sensory Play Activity
Practice counting. Have your child figure out how many pieces of cereal or how many bees will fit in each hexagon. You can also practice subtraction, addition, and if you write a number in each hexagon, one-to-one correspondence and number recognition.
Talk about shapes. Show your child images or objects shaped like hexagons and talk about the number of sides, etc.
Talk about beehives and honeycomb. Look at close-up images of beehives and bees found on the internet and compare the bees honeycomb to the one you made and the cereal.
Make our Bee Life Cycle Sensory Bin and learn about the life cycle of bees.
Practice verbal skills. Ask your child to describe the cereal and other supplies — what does it look like, how does it feel, what is the taste and smell, etc.
Read books about bees and talk about how bees eat, how honey is made and what the bees do for our world.
Get into the science. Do this bee pollination experiment, a fun honeycomb experiment, or watch a scientific video about bees together.
Make bee crafts or bee artwork and display it.
Contact a local beekeeper or ask your county extension office if they have any kind of bee education programs where you can taste honey, taste honeycomb, and learn about bees from a master.
Books to Read about Bees
- Give Bees a Chance by Bethany Barton
- What if There Were No Bees by Suzanne Slade
- It Starts with a Bee by Jennie Webber
-
The Honeybee by Kirsten Hall
- UnBEElievables: Honeybee Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian
- The Honey Makers by Gail Gibbons
-
The Beeman by Laurie Krebs
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Directions:
