Bee-utiful Printmaking

What a lot we have learnt about bee bodies over the last few weeks.  Bee's have amazing bodies, full of nifty tricks and their body parts are called the most wonderful words.  We've learnt about their long straw-like tongue called a proboscis, their thorax (to be said like 'The Hulk' showing off our muscles!) which is the motor house for their wings and their long, useful antennae.  We've learnt about forewings and forelegs, hind wings and hind legs.  Did you know that they have pollen baskets on their hind legs and they use their fore and mid legs to brush the pollen into their pollen baskets.  What is pretty cool is their five eyes (yes - five eyes!  Two compound and three simple).  

To show off what we had learnt we each designed and created a cardboard printing block.  We made the base of the block using the basic three segments of the bee (head, thorax and abdomen) which we then decorated with all the essential bits likes wings, legs and a stinger (but only if it's a girl!).  We did make quite a mess!

Then we got busy printmaking!  We tried two different types of printmaking.  First we wrapped our printing block up in a tight parcel with some paper and rubbed a crayon over it, transferring the image onto the paper.  We found that if we use more than one colour it gave a really neat effect.  Then we used proper printing ink and rollers.  We carefully rolled the ink onto our printing block and then using a dry roller, pressed the image onto some paper.  These looked pretty jolly fancy!  Come in and check them out!