Cultivating Bug Love

My girls love being outside. They love getting dirty, wet, chalky, bubble-y.

They love the grass and flowers. The birds and animals.

They aren’t really huge fans of bugs though.

In fact, creepy crawlies are probably their least favorite things about being outside.

They like to explore and examine all sorts of things,

but bugs tend to freak them out.

 

That is, until we decided to study bugs in school.

I is for Insects.

Heck yeah.

Okay, she still looks a little freaked out in that picture, but that was at the very beginning of our unit. And she was holding a hornet. It was dead. But it was a hornet.

Anyway, we did all sorts of fun stuff with bugs.

We used bugs for counting and sorting and puzzling.

We studied bug life cycles.

We learned cool words: Metamorphosis. Chrysalis. Pupa. Thorax. Proboscis. Glossa.

We learned all about lots of different kinds of bugs and read tons of books, fiction and nonfiction, about them.

Books about ants.

Like:

Ant Cities (Dorros)

Bug Safari (Barner)

Ants (Stewart)

The Ant and the Grasshopper (White)

Books about bees.

Like:

Busy Buzzy Bee (Wallace)

Bees (Slade)

Honey Bees (Schaefer)

Bees! (Winchester/TIME for Kids)

Gran’s Bees (Thompson)

Crickets:

Old Cricket (Wheeler)

A Pocketful of Cricket (Caudill)

Crickets (Coughlan)

Mosquitoes:

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ear (Aardema)

Mosquitoes (Coughlan)

Butterflies:

Are You a Butterfly? (Allen)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle)

From Caterpillar to Butterfly (Heiligman)

Caterpillar to Butterfly (Marsh)

Glasswings – A Butterfly’s Story (Kleven)

My Oh My – A Butterfly! (Rabe)

Where Butterflies Grow (Ryder)

Speaking of which, look what came in the mail yesterday!

Grasshoppers:

The Ant and the Grasshopper (White, same book as above in the Ants section)

Grasshoppers (Coughlan)

Also:

Fireflies (Coughlan)

and

The Very Clumsy Click Beetle (Carle)

Even especially yucky, annoying bugs like termites and flies and fleas:

Roberto the Insect Architect (Laden)

Diary of a Fly (Cronin)

A Flea Story (Lionni)

And general bug books:

Insect Soup (Polisar)

Insects (Bernard)

How to Hide a Butterfly and Other Insects (Heller)

Insect Homes (Hopkins)

The Very Ugly Bug (Pichon)

Insect Detective (Voake)

The last book was especially great to read after we went to a local nature preserve yesterday to look for bugs. We went with some other homeschooling families and reserved time with a naturalist to look in the ponds and prairies for insects. Unfortunately, it was raining the whole time, so we didn’t even try the prairies and only got to scoop stuff out of the ponds. But the girls got to see dragonfly and damselfly nymphs (which I had never seen before) as well as lots of tiny tadpoles. They even saw one of the dragonfly nymphs start to eat one of the tadpoles!

Today we finished up with ladybugs:

The Grouchy Ladybug (Carle)

Starting Life Ladybug (Llewellyn)

Ladybug, Ladybug (Brown)

Ladybug Girl (Soman)

Lara Ladybug (Florie)

What the Ladybug Heard (Donaldson)

The freak-out factor with bugs has decreased significantly. They are much more likely now to say “cool!” when they see a bug than to be scared of it.

That’s not to say they’re totally loving bugs though. Miss lost her ever-loving mind yesterday when a mosquito got into the car as we were leaving the nature preserve.

But no one loves mosquitoes…