Zoology – Insects

This year, we are focusing on Zoology as part of our Cultural Studies.

We began by learning about Living/Non-Living. We learned that living things can move, they grow, need air, food, and water to survive, and they can reproduce. To reinforce their understanding of this classification, the children engaged in sorting objects into the two categories.

Next, we learned about the classifications of animals into vertebrate/invertebrate. We took a closer look at our own body and as we felt our spine and bones inside our body, we agreed that we belong to the vertebrate group.

Finally, we divided the invertebrates and vertebrates into further sub groups: insects, mollusks, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. We will be studying each of these groups more deeply in the coming months.

We spent the month of October learning about the characteristics of insects, taking a closer look at the grasshopper, studying the life-cycle of the butterfly and the ladybug, and reading beautiful books about various insects. We even turned Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar into an interactive story-telling activity using a sock puppet and pretend food.

Our afternooners had a chance to use a measuring tape to measure the caterpillar each time he ate something and record the change on a chart.

For the finale, we had the Insect Discovery Lab visit us from San Francisco and teach us about some amazing insects. We had a chance to look at, pet, or hold a grasshopper, a beetle, a giant walking stick, a Madagascar hissing cockroach, and an arthropod: a giant millipede! The children were so engaged and so gentle with the creatures – it was beautiful to watch and be a part of this wonderful celebration of insects!