A few weeks ago, I would take the boys in the park for nature walks. And we would always stop by in this huge pond were we get to see different animals and insects like swans, flies and ducks. It’s a good thing that we previously had Insect Unit as Mavi was always on the lookout for insects and identify them.
So I was thinking then that since we have the Marine Animals, why not talk about the animals in ponds, lakes, streams etc. And that’s what we exactly did yesterday. I made picture cards similar to our Marine Animals Cards and talk about each of the animals in the picture and identify in which freshwater ecosystem it belongs.
If you would like to have a copy, simply click on the image below
And this is how Mavi interprets the pond in our park.
One of my objective this year is for Mavi to have a bigger understanding of the animal kingdom. During his preschool and totschool days, I introduced animals via themed activities which he truly enjoyed. But there was a point that he would asks more complicated questions and I just knew that I have to put “depth” into our lessons.
So let me share with you our outline of study which I considered as a guideline whenever we have a study about animals. Now, this outline is for elementary level and I would not recommend this to preschoolers. Familiarization is the first key for preschoolers to understand about the animals and the themed activities are best for this.
This is the second part of our Arthropod Study. I suggest you read the first part of this post to know more of our materials and how I started introducing this entire subject to my son.
Here are the activities we've done on the last part of our Insect Study.
Activity 1: Moulding insects using plasticine and playdough.
Activity 2: Matching the insect figures to the of the insect picture cards we have. Also, we used our fact cards to learn about each insect group and their characteristics.
Activity 3: Body parts. Here Mavi worked on a worksheet identifying the major body parts of an insect. Earlier we've studied the different body parts of an insect. Read about it here.
Activity 4: Sorting of insect and non-insect animal figures. Oh he loved this!! See how he identifies the figure? He sorted them by counting their legs!
Activity 5: This is just out of the blue activity. I was cleaning up our kitchen and saw Mavi's old learning materials in a box. So I took them out and let him play with these minibeasts again. We had this activity before when he was 3 years old, picking up the insects using the kiddie chopsticks. The toy insects were from a local store here.
And that ends our Arthropod-Insect Study :) Next is Crustaceans and Centipedes, but I'm reserving this topic in July or August.
And there you go peeps! If you have any questions just leave me comment and I will get back to you as soon as I can. You are free to share this post and copy the activities (just link back to me if you find my activities interesting).
You can now download my FREE files on Arthropods or purchase the complete pack for just 1.99USD only!
The first one, here's the link to the free Arthropod Chart. We are using this as a guide for our study. Just click the image below for your free download.
Second, I made these cards, the Insect Cards (Nomenclature) and Fact Cards. The way I made the it was based on the orders or group of the insects. Again, click any of the images below so you can enjoy this freebie. There are 12 insects in this file and 6 fact cards.
Lastly, you can avail the entire learning pack for purchase at a very affordable price.
Click the image for the links
Included in the file: Master Control Chart Chart with pictures and no labels Chart with labels and no pictures Chart with no labels and no pictures Fact cards for Arthropods Sorting activity for Arthropods Picture cards to form the Arthropod Chart 40 picture cards (Arthropods) 40 labels 40 control cards 21 Fact cards for each Arthropod Subclass/Order
Arthropods, is quite a huge subject, especially for little ones who's exposed to this for the first time. To them, there's only insects. But now, here I am explaining to my son that everything he sees that's not a mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian or fish is insect. And just like those vertebrates, insects are just part of a much bigger group that is called Arthropods.
Materials Used:
Animal King Chart (Arthropod) by Pinay Homeschooler. I am giving the master chart for free together with the definition cards and sorting activity. The chart activities together with the rest of the pack will be put into a bundle. It will be available for purchase for just a small price.
Arthropod Cards. I am giving away the common insect cards for free. Again, the entire arthropod cards will be included in the bundle. This will be available in the next post.
Animal Lifecycle Cards. We used this to identify insects that undergo incomplete metamorphosis (grasshopper) and complete metamorphosis (butterfly).
Books used (affiliates), please refer at the end of this post.
Activity 1: Presentation of the Arthropod Chart
To introduce the Arthropods, I presented the Animal Kingdom Chart -> Arthropods to Mavi. He's already familiar with this as we have had Animal Kingdom lessons previously. Now I just have to explain, that similar to the Chordates, Arthropod is a group composed of different species like crabs, centipedes, millipedes, spiders and insects.
He loves the chart! It helped that we did Animal Kingdom before :) As you can see in the picture, we worked on sorting the animal figures according to the description cards which is included in my printable. You need not to worry if you don't own any of these, I included picture cards in the free file so you can still conduct this activity.
I let him read the description cards and he investigated whether the descriptions are indeed true! Like the number of legs, whether they have antennae or if they have indeed body/thorax/abdomen composition.
As you can see, our little Vito is quite interested with what we do as well!
We first looked into the group of Insects
Activity 2: Life cycles. There are two lifecycles we discussed here. First the one with incomplete metamorphosis like grasshoppers (egg->nymph->adult) and the complete metamorphosis like ladybugs (egg->larvae->pupa->adult). You can get a copy of my ANIMAL LIFECYCLES HERE.
Activity 3:Body parts. Here we look into the body parts of the insects and how each of these parts differ. Like how does the wings of butterfly differ from that of the grasshopper and dragonfly. The difference between the shape of the abdomens of each insect etc.
Activity4: Books. We read read read books! And my son loves matching our animal figures to those on the books!
And that ends the first part of our study. More coming up in the next post!
PS. I do not read-proof my post. Please understand that I breastfeed and babysit while I write and sometimes, my brain is faster than my fingers. So if you encounter typo/grammar error, my bad and my apologies. I just have no time to read-proof, thus the reason why I place as much pictures as I can to demonstrate our activities without too much explanation. Thank you for your understanding!
Activity 1: Camouflage. We talk about how the animals adapt to their environment and protect their selves from predators. Here we used Legos and see if we can easily spot the animals.
Activity 2: Watching videos in Youtube on the different habitats of the world.
Activity 3: Spelling and vocabulary. We used the moveable alphabets I purchased from Absorbent Minds.
To spice up our spelling activity, I have these pouches and use it to make a guess the word game. I place the letters for each word to guess in the pouch and added clues like picture of an animal figure.
Activity 4: I printed our coloring pages for Mavi to work on.
Activity 5: Mapping. We identify the top five deserts of the world and plot them in the map.
And that concludes our habitat lesson :) Thank you for taking time reading my post. We'll do more interesting stuff in our next study unit.
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