Vito and I have been talking about insects in the past few days. I mentioned in my previous post, the current interest on insects was brought about by their sudden appearance. So far he has encountered quite a few already like garden ants, flies, wasps and bees, and bugs. It’s a shame we haven’t seen grasshoppers and dragonflies here, I used to catch and collect them as a child (back in Asia). Anyway, since our last activity on Farm Families, Vito still loves to learn about mommies, daddies, and babies, thus I introduced the life cycle of insects early on in our activities. Unlike my past activities with Mavi, this one is very simple and straight forward.
BOOKS ABOUT INSECTS
We first read these books (Are You an Ant? Are You a Bee? Are You a Butterfly? The Ladybug) to get him into the game. We’re reading them every morning as we observe some bugs in the yard. We haven’t seen ladybirds yet nor butterflies, so we focused more on ants and bees. These books are some of the best books about life cycles of insects which are designed for preschoolers and young kids. We also have another series of books on life cycles (Let’s Read and Find Out Level 2), but they are more suitable for kindergarten and lower elementary.
The First Discovery Book series is our favourite. We have lots of them and the boys enjoy reading their books!
INSECTS LIFE CYCLE CARDS FOR PRESCHOOLERS
I can use my life cycle learning materials for Vito, so I made these for him. They turned out so beautiful! This is NOT my idea, the inspiration was from The Helpful Garden. I can’t share these cards (with REAL images) as I don’t have distribution rights to the images used in the materials. These are very easy to make though, and you can get all these images for free in Arkive as long as it is for personal use only. Again, images in these cards ARE NOT MINE, all from ARKIVE.
UPDATE! I've recently released a similar product in my shop but using different sets of images. You can get or check them here, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats. Or click the image below
This is my setup of our life cycle materials in the shelf. If Vito wants to work on a set, I would ask him to pick one (at a time), bring it to the table (the cards and the basket) and we’ll work it out together. Please note though, that prior to this I conducted individual presentation for each life cycle.
His first pick was the ant, followed by the ladybird. Because we’ve read the books before we did this, he was already familiar with the images. Before we started, I made him examine the cards first and he kept on asking what are they called. Of course, he knew the names of the adult insects and the eggs but still couldn’t grasp the concept of larva/larvae and pupa/pupae.
Do you see him pointing to the image? I encouraged him to describe the image or figure of each stage. Here he is describing the larva of a ladybird, has two colors: black and yellow.
This is a straight forward lesson, just matching and more on discussion, encouraging the child to talk about his or her observations of the figures and the images. For older kids, you can check out my activity with Mavi years ago, Complete Guide to Insect Study for Grade-Schoolers. This has more depth and includes definition cards.
List of Insect Study Activities:
- Complete Guide to Insect Study for Grade-Schoolers (with free printable)
- Insects for Toddlers (with free printable)
You can also get a FREE copy of our ANIMAL LIFE CYCLES LEARNING PACK from here.
LIFE CYCLE OF AN ANT
This is my set-up for the ant life cycle during my presentation. As I mentioned before, I read the book to Vito first and then I moved on to showing him the life cycle in the cards.
LIFE CYCLE OF A BUTTERFLY
Here’s our butterfly life cycle. During the presentation, Vito said “I know this!”, he then took our book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and matched the caterpillar to the book’s image. It was quite difficult for me to present this because he has no close up experience with butterflies yet. So he was just interested with their names, but didn’t keep asking questions.
LIFE CYCLE OF A BEE
Aside from ants, Vito was also very interested with the bee’s life cycle because we've seen them in our front lawn everyday.
LIFE CYCLE OF A LADYBIRD
Finally, the ladybird life cycle. Similar to the butterfly, Vito wasn’t interested with the ladybird but this is my favorite life cycle just like the butterfly because of the difference between the larva and the pupa. Ladybirds appear around June here so we’ll revisit this once Vito sees these beautiful bugs in real life.
More learning materials at Pinay Homeschooler Shop.
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