To learn more about the butterfly life cycle, we recreated the life cycle with pasta. This was such a fun activity because I could tell how much they've grown. They all followed directions really well and really understood what we were doing and could tell me what came next. So impressed.
We also read The Very Hungry Caterpillar (a fave book of mine and super popular). I have puzzles, a board game, and a story board to retell the story, so we did that too.
We also learned about lots of other cool bugs. We played in ant tunnels during self-select play time in dramatic play the first week, and had tons of fun. I added pics from google image of ant tunnels and they were pretty enthralled with those.
For large group the first day, we read about ants and learned they have a queen who lays eggs, "babysitter" ants who take care of the eggs and babies (larvae) and also worker ants who gather the food, and dig the tunnels and build the ant hill. We had a lot of fun going back to the tunnels to act like ants. We had a queen who sat there in one tent, a babysitter ant in another tent caring for some dolls, and then worker ants scrambling like crazy, in and out of the other room where the toy kitchen was being stored, bringing food to the queen and babysitter ants. They had so much fun! We had to do it a few times to take turns at different jobs. They got to recreate it and play again Wednesday doing the same thing too, so I left all the food out for them. We had some hungry ants!
We also did some ant math with story cards. I love math story cards! We sat there with our cards and ants, and I told stories like, "1 ant came to play, then 1 more came. How many ants do you have now?" Great counting, adding, and subtracting, and they think they're just playing! They even got to tell me their own math stories and they were pretty incredible.
Along with our ant theme, we ate ants on a log for snack, which was the classic peanut butter on celery with raisins. I think my child was the only one to eat it, but I had a few begging for more raisins and eating tons of those, some others who just kept licking out the PB and asking for more, and then one who scraped everything out and only ate the celery. I guess I should have just handed out the ingredients, but they did find it funny to get to eat ants for snack!
We had these plastic bugs, catchers, and magnifiers out the whole 2 weeks and they were the favorite toy. These kids are just animal lovers and could play make-believe with them all day long.
We also "grew" bugs in a jar (had to transfer to a bigger one than this) and documented their growth on a chart.
I have lots of bug puzzles and dominoes, with Ldaybug ABCs and counting 1-10, so we had a lot of fun in the small manips area during our bug weeks too.
We learned the difference between insects and spiders too. We sang "Head Thorax Abdomen" to the tune of "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" to learn the parts of an insect. We sorted our bugs by counting their legs to learn if they were a spider or insect. Awesome and easy math tie in with counting and sorting. I even brought back the spider web we had done Halloween week for our second week of dramatic play. And here are our cute 3-bodied, 6-legged, glittery bugs from art!
The best part about bug week (besides the caterpillars) was searching for bugs outside. They were so brave! We brought the magnifying glasses outside each day, and pulled up rocks, dug around in a stump, and dug in the dirt to see what we could find. We found lots of spiders and they'd scream, but then sit and watch them too. As a person who HATES spiders, I was proud of them and I never want to pass on my irrational fears, so I scream inside and act like it's fun to watch them. We also found worms, slugs, potato bugs (the favorite) and other things I don't know the name of. We had a blast exploring the yard. We even found a bunch of empty praying mantis egg cases all over my fence.
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