March 10th, 2010

Have we been busy lately!

Last Friday, we became acquainted with our new stick bug friend. We took a vote to decide on the name and we voted on Hunter.


We held Hunter, felt his exoskeleton, counted his legs (6) and observed his eyes. We were fascinated by his amazing camouflage.





Some of us drew pictures of Hunter and other insects.




We are still learning about insect body parts. On Monday, we worked on our Insects Have Exoskeletons and Insects Have Compound Eyes poster. We cut out pictures of exoskeletons and pasted them to our poster.

Some of us drew pictures of compound eyes to add to our poster.

Today, we had music with Ms. Shelley. Here is a video of us singing one of our favorite songs about nature.

We continue to sing our Head-Thorax-Abdomen song. It helps us remember the body parts of insects so we can identify them when we find them. Here is a video of us singing about insect body parts.

In atelier today, we played with noodles in the sensory table. We honed our fine motor skills as we used tweezers to pick up individual noodles and our math observational skills as we compared the lengths of the noodles.




We also used the play dough and pipe cleaners to create bugs. Here is a video of Sammy explaining about the insect he created.

We also used the projector to trace insects. As we traced we noticed the body parts of the insects, including head, thorax and abdomen and six legs. We painted our insects and will label them after they dry.

We also explored in a new insect terrarium. At first, we couldn't see any insects. Some of us thought the bugs were so well camouflaged that we couldn't find them. Other Entomologists thought they were hiding under the wood and soil.



As we dug, we found worms, pill bugs, slugs and ants. We studied each insect. Only the ants were insects, the rest were bugs.


This afternoon we started labeling some big bug posters we made. We labeled "Worm" and "crop" on the worm poster. We write the sounds we hear and use our alphabet sheets to remind us of how to write our letters.


It was Hudson's birthday. Happy birthday, Hudson! We love you!