We just concluded our study of insects and oh boy, both Mavi and Vito had a wonderful time learning all about these creatures! We’re having zoology (animal study) for this month (12 Months of Montessori Series) and I’m going to give you a complete guide on how to study insects with your kids.
What is an insect?
Start your unit study by learning what is an insect. Put it simply, it is an animal that has 6 legs with segmented bodies. And yes please, spiders are definitely NOT insects. Now for Mavi to have a wider understanding of this subject, I've set up a sorting activity of the 4 major groups of the Arthropods. Since we've done this last year, Mavi has a prior knowledge of the difference between insects and spiders. He got confused with the crab though, if its either arachnids or crustaceans LOL. Initially he placed it in the Arachnids 
These animal figures were from Safari Toob Insects and Insect Lore.
These animal figures were from Safari Toob Insects and Insect Lore.
The Life Cycle of an Insect
Now after learning about the animals that belong to the insect family, we looked into the life cycles of an insect. Here we talked about the insects that undergo “complete metamorphosis” and those with “incomplete metamorphosis”. Note complete metamorphosis means, it has the stages of: egg-larva-pupa-adult.
Parts of an Insect
We also learned about the different parts of an insect. I have a separate post on this one and you read it here or click the image below.
Insect Habitats and Bug Hunting
I created guides on hunting insects in different habitats. We have insects found in woodlands (in the forest), those found in rivers and lakes, the ones found everywhere and in the meadows/fields. We used these guides as we go “bug hunting”.
We were able to catch a few insects like ladybird (escaped from our net after a few hours), this unidentified insect in the outdoor stairs and ants.
Vito was fascinated with ants! He also had a separate insect study for toddlers.
Previous Post on Insects
- The World of Arthropods Part One
- The world of Arthropods Part Two
- FREE Arthropods Chart
- Insect Activities for Preschooler
- Life Cycle of a Butterfly for Preschoolers
- Grasshoppers
- Parts of a Ladybird
- Life Cycle of a Ladybug
If you need some learning materials about insects you can also buy the following from my printable shop:
The Arthropods Learning Pack
The Insect
The Ant
The Grasshopper
The Dragonfly
This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.
