Bugs, Bugs & More Bugs!

This unit lends itself to many, many strong hands activities where we get to use our little fingers.  Using strawberry hullers, we placed teeny tiny little plastic ants into small ice cub trays.  The sand table was filled with all kinds of plastic bugs that we scooped, crawled and helped dig tunnels for.  Rubber stamps were flying as kids created beautiful bug scenes or just went crazy stamping bugs.  We had pattern block butterflies to make, rubber caterpillars to pick up with butterfly hair clips, and Cootie Bugs to make.  Bug Easter eggs were fun to match and put together and we had a blast with the wind up bug toys to make them move, wiggle, hop, or jump.  Magnetic puzzle pieces were tricky to take out and put in with a magnet attached to a string.  We fed our hungry caterpillars and played BUG SWAT where you have to use a small fly swatter to point to a bug picture.  We work on "symmetry" during our bug unit, as butterflies and bugs are nature's perfect demonstrator of natural symmetry.

The bees were buzzing to their hive with a letter beehive lotto game.  Our ladybugs needed some spots, so the younger kids rolled a color dice to determine what color spots our ladybugs needed, and the older kids used a dice and the "key" to find their colors.  Ladybug squeezers helped to save the leaves from pom pom aphids.  Ants in the Pants creates lots of giggles and laughter seeing those colored ants fly around!  More symmetry is explored with butterfly games, coloring, and "design your own" butterflies using felt pieces.  We searched for small bee erasers in a tub filled with Honeycomb cereal.  A different tub of bug parts helped us create even more bug creatures!  A magical activity was the spider web rubbing.  The kids were amazed by the "hidden" spider webs on our table (glue that had dried that I made in the shape of a spider web).  With a piece of paper and the side of a crayon, VOILA! a spider web is created!  They then made fingerprint spiders on their webs to add to the effect.  Scoop a Bug is fun as you have to use scooper tongs to pick up the bugs and sort them where they belong.  I also had a smaller Eric Carle, Very Hungry Caterpillar puzzle they enjoyed.

The kids had a blast being bakers while decorating their own cupcakes with pastry bags filled with icing.  We then put all of their wonderful creations together to form a long cupcake caterpillar.  Of course the best part, eating the caterpillars!  Kids got to experience the world of a bug by putting on a bug headband, complete with antennae, and then crawling around under our grassy table.  The timer was busy buzzing away as everyone wanted some turns!  More symmetry with butterfly alphabet matching, creating bugs with the Rainbow Blocks and our magnificent butterfly paintings!  Stringing spiders on their webs was great counting practice.  Playdough and diffuser paper made some wonderful bug creations as well.  We pretended to be bees gathering pollen and placing it in the honeycombs with little yellow beads and tweezers.  There is that static electricity again!  This time we made butterflies fly!

The Bug Unit lends itself to an author study on Eric Carle.  He is one of my favorite authors and his books always have a special surprise.  We read the Very Hungry Caterpillar and the next day we fed a tin can caterpillar his food the next day as we worked on story sequencing and the life cycle of a butterfly.  The Very Busy Spider lent itself to our glue spider webs on the table and making a hula hoop weaving web.  The Very Quiet Cricket with it's magical chirping at the end, The Very Lonely Firefly with the blinking fireflies at the end, and The Very Clumsy Click Beetle with his clicking at the end, are the top kid favorites.  The Grouchy Ladybug works on size concepts and a discussion on feelings, as well as that is how they learned about the bad aphids eating the leaves.  Mrs. D transformed herself into a bug with special goggles.  We played "Bug in the Rug" with the parachute.  This is a detective game where one student (the bug detector) looks around the circle to see who is missing (the bug) and hiding under the rug (parachute).  We played this game over and over!  The older kids just love the beehive game where we try to figure out how many bees are hiding by process of elimination with the numerals.  If there are 3 bees hiding and someone guesses 7, we can erase the 7 and then all of the numbers above 7 (8, 9, 10).  If they guess 2, we can erase 2 and also 1.  Eventually the kids narrow the numbers down so they can guess the correct number of bees hiding.

Bug Lady Visit!

Miss Maire Anne (also known as the "bug lady" by the kids) from BugWorks out of Sudbury, came to visit us last week.  She brought with her many different creatures for us to look at, touch and explore.  She talked about their sizes, shapes, how they protect themselves, what they eat, and how they grow.  She also talked about where some of them came from.  WE LOVE THE BUG LADY!!

Below we had large meal worms that turn into beetles as they mature.  She even showed us a beetle that pretends it is dead to protect itself from predators.  One of the meal worms shed it's skin during the presentations that day (second plate picture with one meal worm and skin).

Here is a giant grasshopper.  He does not fly, his wings are too small, but he does have red under his wings that he can show to say "don't eat me, I taste bad"if something tries to eat him.  The plate with the "second" smaller grasshopper is actually another skin that was shed by the grasshopper that she brought to show us.  She brought a praying mantis baby and a mother one for us to look at and a walking stick.

Below is a hissing cockroach and two kinds of millipedes.  See the cute baby millipede below?

Frog, Lizards, Snakes and Turtles - oh my!

What a lot of creature learning we have going on.  It never ceases to amaze me how much knowledge kids have about the world around them and how curious they are to learn more!

Activities this unit included placing and balancing frogs on a log/wooden block (to go with our song, "Five Green and Speckled Frogs".  For math activities, we added numeral cards to a frog counting book, made frog number lines, created snake patterns, helped frogs eat the correct number of flies, and holding our own creature races by rolling a color and a number dice while making predictions on which creature will win first and who will come in last.  Our strong hands fed flies to a frog with tweezers, traced curvy frog tongue paths, squeezing rubber frogs to open their mouths to feed them foam flies, and coloring lizards amazing colors!  We also had a ton of plastic frogs and craft foam lily pads in the water table and a giant frog puzzle to put together.

How do lizards eat?  With long sticky tongues!  Our lizards ate with magnetic flies.  Matching snakes and frog pictures and frog colors were favorite activities for the AM class.  Sorting and grouping rubber snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs into a sorting tray was a favorite of the PM class.  There were no rules and no clues on how to sort the creatures.  The kids thought of great sorting categories all on their own (by color, by creature, by creature and color, ones that had legs and no legs, animals that are on the ground and ones that can go in the water, etc.).  We also enjoyed alphabet lily pad lotto, sorting turtles by size, and having fun with turtle bean bags and lily pads.  Mrs. D made pipe cleaner snakes so we could fill up colander holes and string cheerios on them.

Can you put the animals where they belong?  With a little clue card, the kids matched the plastic creature with it's initial sound (frogs went on the letter F's, snakes went on the letter S, etc.).  We worked on strong hands by tracing frog paths, using pool noodle pieces to string long snakes on clothesline rope, lacing up turtle cards, and tracing, then cutting straight lines.  AM kids fingerpainted chameleons beautiful and bright colors.  PM kids made a snake numberline that went 1-30.  They really had to work together to complete this long snake!  Cinnamon sugar snakes were a hit for our cooking project.  Our science experiment this unit was to learn about static electricity to make our frogs jump to the balloon.  We first rubbed a filled balloon on our hair to create all of those negative charged electrons.  Then we held the balloon above frog tissue paper cut outs, and VOILA! the positively charged tissue frogs magically jumped to the balloon.  Of course this activity was done over and over again.  They also had a great time seeing their hair stand up tall!

See our tadpoles?  They are growing so fast!  We are on the look out for hind legs.  The PM kids painted snake pictures at the easel.  There were a lot of colorful designs and creations.  S is for Snake with our snake paper chain craft the PM kids did.  Our frog below and his long tongue was a greater than, less than activity where we moved the frogs tongue to the "most" bugs because he was so hungry.  Rattlesnake patterns were a hit.  Each kiddo got a rattlesnake to hold (a plastic mini m&m container with some corn kernals inside and googly eyes and a tongue on the top.  Mrs. D made a pattern on the giant black snake with pattern blocks.  The kids were on the lookout to see if Mrs. D made a mistake.  If she did, they shook their rattlesnakes.  Then we fixed the pattern and continued on.  There was lots of measuring going on.  The AM kids measured how far a frog jumped with foot cards and the PM kids measured classroom items with frog feet rulers.  Mrs. Bailey had fun with the kids during her language groups.