Books: The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Ladybugs: Red, Fiery, and Bright; assorted nonfiction books about insects from the library
Craft: egg cup bugs
Printable packs: Oopsey Daisy Mommy School, Gift of Curiosity
Food (attempt): ants on a log (turns out the boys hate celery)
As a sort of end-of-year skill review, I printed a lot more worksheet pages than usual. I was quite pleased to see how much Owen in particular could do now that he couldn't do six months ago, especially in patterning and with scissors. I'm including boring pictures just so you can see the kinds of activities we did.
Making symmetrical dots on the right wing.
Doing the bug puzzle.
(Unfortunately, this is a hand-me-down, and the magnetic bug-catcher part is missing.)
Circling which one is different. Obviously, we still have some writing grip work to do!
Cutting: circles for Levi, straight lines for Owen.
Such concentration. :)
Patterning + gluing: AABB.
Lower-case letter recognition + crossing things out.
I simply called out a letter for him to cross out.
The egg cup bugs turned out to be a multi-day project, as we had to let paint dry twice and never seemed to get back to it on the same day. You can see Levi's finished project at the top of this post. That was the only bug to get antennae; the pipe-cleaner legs and wings were more tedious than I expected and I gave up before adding antennae to the rest.
The finished bugs. The bumblebee is mine. :D
Levi and Owen played a counting game, a "race" between ants and beetles. Roll a die, place that many pennies on top of your bugs, first person to cover all their bugs wins. Games like this are so easy and yet cover so many skills: taking turns, reading dice, one-to-one correspondence, counting . . . and they love it!
It was actually Levi's idea to go outside on an "insect hunt." I didn't think we'd have too much luck on the back deck, where we spend most of our outside time, so I brought Toby's bouncy seat to the front stoop and let the boys wander in the front yard. I forget, too often, how excited they are by these simple things!
Peering at some ants by the front stoop.
Levi testing out his picture-taking skills.
A roly-poly is NOT an insect, but Levi loves taking close-up pictures.
Those three heads. Love 'em.
After a while, it occurred to me to bring out the sidewalk chalk.
Levi's ant, complete with three body sections, six legs, two antennae, and a smiley face.
(If you can't see that, it may help to know that the head is at the left.)
Besides the printable pack, the Gift of Curiosity blog had all sorts of fun insect-related ideas, including these pattern-block pages. Levi has used these for his math lessons before, but it was Owen's first experience. He jumped right in without any explanation!
We also did a number of do-a-dot pages from Gift of Curiosity: counting, patterning, and mazes.
All in all, this was one of my favorite themes yet (which is funny, since I'm not generally a huge "bug" fan). Science is easily my least favorite subject, so it felt like a huge victory when Levi could name the three sections of an insect's body (head, thorax, abdomen, which he pronounces ab-DO-men) and the four stages of an insect's life cycle (egg, larva, pupa, adult). In fact, since I've been searching around a lot trying to decide what to do for school next year, this week inspired me to consider a "learn about the world" sort of approach -- maybe by continent, or desert/ocean/forest, or something of that nature. In the meantime, I have one more letter-of-the-week theme scheduled, and then we'll take a different approach for summer. Stay tuned!
Naturally, we had to finish out insect week with a trip to the Insect House at the zoo.
I let Daddy take this one. The Insect House creeps me out. :)
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