What are Insects?

Here’s a simple way of telling whether an animal is an insect:  has 6 legs (with or without wings).  This is something new to Vito, the word “insect”.  He usually calls them with their real names like flies, bees, dragonflies, etc. but is not familiar with their category.  Now, this is the first time that I introduced this concept, so he struggled a little bit until we started counting the legs!


First we read our books on insects.  Cathryn Sill’s About Insects: A Guide for Children is a lovely book for little ones that discusses what makes an animal an insect.  I love the illustrations here, but Vito is not familiar with some of the insects featured in this book, so he was only interested with those that he can identify.  The book The Ladybird and The Butterfly were great additions to our readings, more information about these books here, (Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of Insects).


We also love our Bugs Fact Cards from Usborne. The boys and I discussed these insects and shared my own personal experience with these animals (I used to catch grasshoppers and dragonflies as a child).  We also did a scavenger hunt in our yard and checked what insects we can find (we saw wood lice, bees, and ants).


And finally, after these observations and discussions, it was time for Vito to distinguish which animals are insects and which are not. I picked a few animal figures from our Safari toob collections, prepared some felt mats, and labelled each group.  I told him that insects have 6 legs, so he needs to count the legs of our figures to tell the difference.  He loves counting, so he didn’t mind doing it on each figure.




He did really good in counting!