Today’s T&T was on insects, spiders & moles. It was quite the broad topic, but this once a month class at our local Audubon Environmental Education Center is an introduction to young people and their families to getting out and exploring. By having such a broad topic it allowed us to think about how insects & worms in the soil also feed the moles underground as well as birds aboveground.
For a warm-up we made fingerprint insects and spiders with ink pads and colored pencils. If kids and their adult wanted to make up a story to go with it they could.
One of my six year old son's had made a model of the activity with me before hand. He had dictated words to go along with his fingerprint pictures. Here is his story.
Once there were three spiders and one ant.
They found a hole in a house.
They climbed through it.
They slept in it.
And the next morning they woke up. They got out of the hole and then they ate the food on the ground by the kitchen table. Then 3 more spiders and 2 more ants came with a sandwich.
The End.
Books we read were: Itsy Bitsy Spider- A Classic Book Illustrated by Nora Hlib, Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham and Underground by Denise Fleming.
Then we headed outside and pretended we were moles. The trails were our tunnels. My twin boys and I had hid string worms, which we had the kids search for- as well as search for mole holes. After collecting the worms I encouraged the kids to take them home and make worm trail art with paint or mud and make up stories about their worms.
We went on a very short hike to a relatively open area in the woods where we played a game where the adults pretended they were birds and the children pretended they were insects. Kids could choose how to move. Flutter like a butterfly, Squirm like a worm. If the insect/ creepy crawly froze we said they were safe.
Finally we searched for bugs in the leaf litter. It was tough finding them as it is very dry. However we found a few & many signs of decomposers such as holes in leaves.
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