The Arthropods Learning Material (with FREE Files)
Thursday, June 12, 2014
The World of Arthropods for Kids (Part One)
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
So where do I start? LOL
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 an insect. And just like those vertebrates, insects are just part of a much bigger group that is called Arthropods.
Materials Used:
The Animal Kingdom Chart (Arthropods) by The 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 are included in a bundle. It is available for purchase from my shop, "The Arthropods Learning Pack".Arthropod Cards. I am giving away the common insect nomenclature and fact cards for free. Again, the entire arthropods cards will be included in the Learning Pack bundle.
Animal Lifecycle Cards. We used this to identify insects that undergo incomplete metamorphosis (grasshopper) and complete metamorphosis (butterfly).
Animal Figures. All are from Safari Ltd Insect TOOB and Safari Ltd Butterflies TOOB.
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 The 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 worry if you don't own any of these, I included picture cards in the files 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 which 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 looked into the body parts of the insects and how each of these parts differ. Like how does the wings of a butterfly differ from that of the grasshopper and dragonfly. The difference between the shape of the abdomens of each insect etc.
Activity 4: Books. We read a lot of books! And my son loves matching our animal figures to those in the books!
And that ends the first part of our study. More coming up in the next post, The World of Arthropods for Kids (Part Two)!
For other activities: Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Zoology Unit on Pinterest.
More of Insect Activities
Thursday, August 2, 2012
I discovered these rubber-made insect toys on a Euro store and bought it right away for our insect study. My boy was so ecstatic seeing these and played sorting using a tweezer.
It was a perfect practical life activity for an insect study :) It include flies, ants, spiders, worms etc.
Then he also worked on the 3 part card for the parts of an insect. We’ve been doing this activity frequently that he finally understands the difference between hind legs and forelegs.
It’s also helps to have a miniature when working on a nomenclature card.
He’s so used in working with this that he can finish it in less than 3 minutes.
Linking to:
Life Cycle of a Butterfly
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Last week, we looked into the life cycle of a butterfly :)
We read plenty of books before we started making our crafts. Too bad it rained the entire week so we weren’t able to look for some caterpillars or butterflies.
Then we made the life cycle of a butterfly using cardstocks, marker pens and glitters.
As you can see, my son LOVES to add details :)
Here’s the finish product. We used cotton balls for the eggs (and he keeps reminding me that they’re sticky so they won’t fall off the leaf). We did the same thing for the life cycle of a ladybird.
Here, I downloaded it from Education.com (same as the grasshoppers) and made him color it.
Linking to:
Grasshoppers
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
We studied grasshoppers a few weeks ago and here’s a summary of the activities to go along with it:
PARTS OF A GRASSHOPPER. Would love to have the nomenclature cards but then, I’m out of the budget :(
I put double sided tape on the boxes for Mavi to stick the labels of the body parts of the grasshopper. Then we did some grid game. I made him circle the grasshoppers. I wanted to reuse this print-out so I made him use a pencil instead of using a marker.
Then we discussed The life cycle of the grasshopper and did some coloring activities.
Linking to:
Parts of a Ladybird
Thursday, July 12, 2012
To conclude our ladybird unit, we studied the parts of the ladybird using nomenclature cards...
...and the felt puzzle I made.
Previously, we worked on some activities on the ‘life cycle of a ladybird’, read about it here.
Linking this to:
Life Cycle of a Ladybird
Friday, July 6, 2012
My son had been playing with his insect toys lately and since it’s summer, I decided that it was time for an insect study. Honestly, I am terrified of insects... so it took me awhile to do something like this... because the sight of them give me the creeps.
Anyway, first on the list is the study of Ladybird. Yeah, that’s what we call them here instead of “ladybugs”. I told my son that they’re just the same... and I made him use the word “ladybird “ for convenience.
Here’s some of the books I borrowed from the library that is ladybird-related.
Then I also borrowed a “bug” book and it has a few pages discussing the ladybird and it’s life cycle. I love that it shows the detailed growth of the said bug in real pictures.
After I presented it to my boy, I printed out the Ladybug Life Cycle from Montessori Print Shop and have him color it.
I love his choice of colors! They’re all bright and vivid.
Oh and he wrote the labels. I made him trace my handwriting though.
Then after that, we did some crafts for the life cycle just like what we did with the Frog. I realized that I only took a few photos because I was busy directing and helping him out.
And here’s the end product. Lovely isn’t it?