Ants

Dramatic Play

Ant tunnels!

 

Blocks

Our ant farm!

Here are pics of how they progressed over the weeks:










 



Pattern blocks with bug pattern pages


Bug puzzle


Then I realized the tunnels are too active to have anything in the block area, and it was cleared for the next week.

Art

Q-tip painting


Egg carton ants. I made them, they got to color and decorate them.


Sponge brush painting


Paint rollers


Small Manipulatives

Toy bugs


Bug file folder games


Bug puzzles


Counting ants


Outside

Cornmeal and bugs in the sensory table


Searching for ants! We got so lucky on our first day searching! Once ever, we have moved rocks off our wall by the grapes and found an ant tunnel with ants and larvae everywhere. It was for preschool a few years ago. My kids have looked many times over the years and we've never seen it again. So I figured it was a long shot, but I moved a rock and was shocked to find any tunnels are larvae! The kids came running and had a great time observing the ants. It's better than even the ant farm because we watched them scramble to move their eggs and larvae and got to see what those look like up close and in real life. It made all the things we've watched and read about ants real and relatable!
 
 

Large Group
We learned an insect song to help us learn more about ants. It's to the tune of Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes:

Head thorax abdomen. Abdomen. Abdomen.
Head thorax abdomen, six legs and antennae.

Day 1, We learned about insects and sorted toy bugs by insect and not insect. We watched The Magic School Bus about ants while we ate popcorn for a snack.

Day 2, We made a KWL chart. K stands for Know, and we wrote the things we already know about ants. W stands for Want to know, so we wrote any questions or comments about things they want to learn during our ant unit. L stands for learned. We'll add our answers here at the end of the unit.


I loved their questions and curiosity and helping them answer each other's questions. We searched in books and talked about going to the library to find books about any subject you like to learn more about them. We're at the end of the year and they're so excited about learning and keep asking me if we can learn about more subjects they're interested in. I keep telling them to go home and have their parents help them find books about those subjects at the library, or search on the computers for information and videos about them. My favorite things about a play-based preschool is them discovering the fun side of learning and wanting to go on to keep learning more.

Day 3, we learned the life cycle of the ant, and answered some questions on our KWL chart.

Day 4, we took what we learned about ants and acted it out! Kids were assigned "jobs" like queen, nursery ant, scavenger ant, tunnel digging ant, etc. And they all acted out their jobs in the tunnels. The queen laid eggs, the nursery ants took care of them, the tunnel digging ants dug and made new tunnels, while the scavenger ants found food and brought in back in to the queen and storage tunnels. We switched jobs several times and they had so much fun!

Small Group

Counting Ants math stories
Before children are ready to learn addition, they can learn about combining things. We told math stories with our little ants today. We each had different mats, then we took turns telling our stories. For example, there were 2 ants at my picnic, then 3 more ants came. So then I had 5 ants at my picnic. They got to choose their stories, then we used dice to determine the number of ants the second time. Great counting practice, and speaking practice as they had to verbalize their math story!

Little Ants ramble and roam coloring page.

Ant books. We learned to track and follow along left to right as I helped them "read" a beginning reader about ants.

Sorting bugs by color, then size.

Shadows

Dramatic Play

A spotlight. Pretty easy, so no pics! I just blocked off the window, kept the light on this side of the room off, and had a spotlight shining on the wall so they could make shadows. I added different things each day they could use to make shadows with, like toy animals or blocks towers. I also added flashlights later like we had previously used in large groups, so they could control the light to make and change shadows.

Art

Water color pencils. These are so fun, and sometimes hard to find! I actually searched for a few years until I finally found some. I showed them how to use them on paper at first, then about halfway through the day, showed them how we can color and erase on our skin. After that, everyone was painting faces by the mirror and had a super fun time! They have begged and begged to use them again.


Black sponge shadow painting, with ABC sponges


Shape collages


Painting

Small Manipulatives

Shadow matching folder games


Pattern blocks

Puzzles

Magnets

Large Group

Day 1, we went outside at the beginning of the day and traced our shadows. For large group, we went back out (2 hours later) to see how they had changed, and we discovered they moved and got shorter! We went inside to read and find out why. We read What Makes a Shadow? and learned that the sun's movement (or really, earth's movement) is what changed our shadows. We used a flashlight to watch shadows move and change shape.

Day 2, we read Bear Shadow and traced animals shadows outside.






Day 3, we placed our sun dials outside first thing, and marked where the shadows were. We checked on them at large group to see if the shadows had moved. They had! We then took our clipboards around the yard and traced different shadows we found.




 


Day 4, was cloudy!! So I was glad we had done all of our outside shadow activities already. We watched a video about shadows, and then made a shadow picture. The kids colored a cut out person to look like themselves and glued it onto a paper. Then I had a sun stamp, and a person stamp. They stamped on the sun, then had to figure out where their shadow would be, then they stamped their shadow with the person stamp in black paint.

Small Group

One group worked independently on puzzles, while my group built with blocks. I called them one at a time from my group so I could trace their silhouette.

The next week, one group decorated their sun dials, while the other group decorated their cut out silhouettes, and spelled their names on them with ABC stickers.