Insect Themed Learning Trays for Toddlers

 Sharing with you what's on our shelves and activity trays for the next two weeks: Insect Theme.

Insect Themed Lesson Plans for Kindergarten to First Grade

We are about to conclude our INSECT UNIT which we have been working on for the past two weeks and I am so happy to finally share the lesson plan that I made for my Kindergarten.  Now, though this is designed for my almost 6 year old boy, this unit study is also appropriate for kids from 5 years and older.  We have done tons of identification and sensorial activities previously on this subject area and this year, we’re doing some advanced work.

Insect Theme Toob Printable Learning Materials

Here’s a comprehensive activity pack with your Safari Toob Insect set.  This INSECT TOOB LEARNING PACK learning material contains tons of extension activities that include science, language, math and fine motor skills.  And, of course, this learning material uses HIGH-QUALITY REAL IMAGES of the animals!

Learning about Insects for Home and School

Assembling unit studies is one of the things that I like doing.  Last summer, we worked on insects and I made a compilation of work which the boys did over the years on learning about these amazing animals.  You will absolutely love these ideas and they are perfect for kids from 5 to 10 years old.

FREE Insect Counting Mats

Due to a lot of requests from our readers, I’m sharing our FREE Insect Jars Counting Mats which we used in our Indoor Garden Play Bug Counting Activity.

Montessori Inspired Insect Activities for Preschoolers

Here’s a summary of our insect activities for the past week.  Most of these materials are old and reused and many of our activities were not planned but are based on Vito's interest because bugs and other tiny creatures appeared earlier than expected.  Hope this post will give you some ideas on learning activities about these creatures!

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!

Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of Insects

Vito and I have been talking about insects in the past few days.  I mentioned in my previous post, the current interest on insects was brought about by their sudden appearance.  So far he has encountered quite a few already like garden ants, flies, wasps and bees, and bugs. It’s a shame we haven’t seen grasshoppers and dragonflies here, I used to catch and collect them as a child (back in Asia). Anyway, since our last activity on Farm Families, Vito still loves to learn about mommies, daddies, and babies, thus I introduced the life cycle of insects early on in our activities.  Unlike my past activities with Mavi, this one is very simple and straight forward.

Seen here are the life cycles figures of:  butterfly, bee, ant, and ladybird.

Indoor Garden Play for Counting Bugs

Vito is 42 months old.

So we are seeing a lot of bugs lately.  Vito is enjoying it!  We do nature walks in the morning to see the honeybees, flies and unidentified flying objects in the field. And we even caught the wasp that went inside the house last week for exploration.  Lately, we would walk our way to Mavi’s school to pick him up.  During these walks, we would count the number of bugs we see in the bushes and trees.  Vito enjoyed it and I thought that we could also do it at home as an extension.  So I made this “garden” setup for him, wherein we will pretend to catch bugs with our tweezers and place the right number in our number cards. 

Montessori-Inspired Activity: The Life of a Honey Bee

Vito is 32 months old.

The appearance of the honey bees in our front and backyard has led us to look into the lives of these beautiful creatures who are the main source of honey.  Vito is terrified of them but not Mavi.  We were out the other day catching a few of them, observing how they produce the buzzing sound and freed them up again.

Montessori Inspired Insects Activity

I am reintroducing some Montessori-inspired activities once again to Vito.  We’ve been doing lots of free play for the past few days that I miss giving him “prepared” activities.  As he will turn three in the next few months, I’m planning to have a more “structured” schedule and curriculum for him this school year. I’ll share that later on once I figure out how to do that. 

Anyway, so in our Insects Unit, I borrowed these cards from my friends at The Wise Owl.  They’re Philippine based online shop that provides Montessori cards and Safari Toob figures locally.  Their cards are lovely and the images are so beautiful!

FREE Insect Habitats Learning Material

Here are some of the learning materials that we used in our activity, Complete Guide to Insect Study for Grade-Schoolers.  You can now download a free copy of the file, I’m sharing it for everyone to enjoy.

Complete Guide to Insect Study for Grade-Schoolers

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.

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. 

Materials here are Insect Lore Life Cycle of Butterfly and Ladybug

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. 

Vito’s Insect Study

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

Thank you so much for taking time to read this post. I hope that I was able to give you enough ideas so you can also jumpstart your own insect study with your kids.

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.

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now ~ Planting Peas

The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama’s Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Child Led Life

Every Star Is Different ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler

Montessori-Inspired Parts of an Insect

We are having a blast looking into the world of insects! In this post, I will show you how we are learning the different parts of an insects as well as the source of our materials.

Seen on the picture are the materials we are using to learn about the insect’s body parts.  The insects that we examined here are ants, butterfly, ladybird, grasshopper and dragonfly.  As you can see, this is NOT really hands-on because of two factors:

• The absence of these insects (except for ants and ladybird) during the time we have this study.  No grasshoppers (tropical country) and no butterfly at all!
• We cannot dissect ladybird and ants.  They’re just too tiny!

With these, we just used our nomenclature cards and animal figures.  Speaking of animal figures, I highly recommend Safari Toobs Insects.  You can easily demonstrate the body parts because of the details in the figures.

Resources in the picture:

• FREE Insects and Spider Silhouette Cards.
• Insect cards from my Arthropods Pack
• FREE Butterfly Nomenclature Cards
• Grasshopper Nomenclature Cards
• Ants Nomenclature Cards
• Caterpillar Nomenclature Cards
• Dragonfly Nomenclature Cards
• Insect Nomenclature Cards
• Usborne Bugs Book
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Montessori Butterfly Puzzle
• Montessori Wasp Puzzle
• Safari Toob Insects

Nomenclature Cards

We worked on the entire nomenclature cards in the span of one week.  Because of the repetition of the activity, Mavi was able to identify the similarities of these insects, like:

• They have segmented bodies: head, thorax and abdomen
• 6 legs
• Most have antennae

Each nomenclature card comes with a definition booklet of the body parts.  Mavi loves reading our booklets (this is a perfect way to let your child improve their reading skills!)

Montessori Puzzles
I purchased these puzzles before I had Vito.  We used it to identify the different parts of an insect and worked on it


Mavi loves to trace the puzzles and made his own version of butterfly.
The puzzle was also enjoyed by Vito.  He loves butterfly (even if he hasn’t seen one yet) and chose to work on the puzzle.

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FREE Insects & Spider Silhouette Cards

These are the many ways to use our FREE Insects and Spider Silhouette Cards!

• Print two copies and you can have a memory game!
• Match it with your animal figures
• Use it as a pattern for drawing.

Insect Study for Toddlers with Free Printable {Learn & Play Link Up}

We are learning about insects this month! And because I'm exhausted most of the time doing separate activities for the boys, this time, I tried having a themed unit which both boys can enjoy.  So while Mavi is learning about insects, Vito is learning as well, but in a different level.  I will showcase Mavi's activities later on. In this post, allow me to present to you simple activities that will expose or introduce your little toddlers to insects.

So for Vito, I prepared 3 simple activities for him to enjoy. These are easy to prepare and I provided a printable file for the matching activity for your convenience.

Insect Sensory Bin
This is a no-brainer.  I think all kids love sensory tubs!  The contents of my bin are:

• Safari Toob Insects
• Black Beans 
• Butterfly figures from Wild Republic

In less than a minute, I have a learning toy for Vito already!  Oh my, he was sooooo giddy when he saw this!

Allow your little ones to explore all that there is in the bin. Make sure to prepare your vacuum cleaner for the mess!  But please, SUPERVISE YOUR CHILD ALL THE TIME.  Vito mouths objects so I watch him like a hawk to make sure he won't swallow any of the beans.

Insect Matching Cards

 

This is matching the insect figures to that of an abstract material, like the cards.  I wanted to use picture books, to avoid printing. But I realized that Vito can match objects better if the pictures look exactly the same as those figures.  So I took photos of our insect figures and created matching cards from them.

Yes, Vito can identify animals now, especially in books! So I experimented if he can do it with in matching cards.  Like the cards? You can download it from here.

I added spider even if it's NOT an insect because this is what Vito sees everyday outside our house.  He can identify spider and calls them "der".  So with an animal figure and a matching card, I tried if he can match them.... and he did!!

So my conclusion here is that, for his age, he can only match cards of those he is familiar with in real life.  Like the butterfly, the ladybird and the spider.  The rest, he ignored them.   That's a good start though.  We'll work on this step by step.  Three matching cards for a little toddler and I'll add one card as he progresses.

Bug Hunting
Of course, the best way to learn is to have a real life encounter with these creepy crawlers.  I took out the boys in the yard and we searched for bugs.  Unfortunately, the bugs decided to hibernate, so we only collected ants!

Even so, Vito was still happy observing the tiny creatures!

You might also want to check The Complete Guide to Insect Study for Grade-Schoolers from here.

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!
My favourites for this week's linky are:

Montessori Fine Motor Activities from Montessori Nature
Learning Begins at Home from Just Another Mom
Best DIY Light Table Tutorials and Ideas from Wonder Baby
Summer Sidewalk Chalk Kids from Child Led Life
 

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.
If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

• Montessori Education
• Homeschool
• Sensory Play
• Tot and Preschool Trays
• Fine and Gross Motor Activities
• Kids in the Kitchen
• Healthy Recipes for Kids
• Arts and Crafts
• Natural Living
• Free Educational Printables
• Family-Oriented Activities
• Healthy Living

Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest

Vanessa from Mama’s Happy Hive~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jennifer from Study at Home Mama~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Marie from Child Led Life~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jae from Pinay Homeschooler~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Heather from Golden Reflections Blog~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Renae from Every Star is Different~FB~Pinterest

GUIDELINES FOR LINKINGPlease link up 1-3 posts
Follow each of the hosts on social media
When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.
By entering a link, you’re giving us permission to feature an image on our blogs. Proper credit & links will ALWAYS be given.
Please visit a couple of shared posts and leave a comment for them
Remember that you must link back in order to be featured

Grab This Button:

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An InLinkz Link-up

Animal Unit Studies and {Learn & Play Link Up # 5}

Another week of Learn & Play Link Up! I am so excited to feature 5 blog posts that has captured my attention.  As you all know, we love doing animal studies at home because Mavi looooovess learning about them!! And my little Vito is now obsessed with dogs and spiders! Yes! spiders! So I’m thinking of having an animal study soon, and I now know where to get inspiration!

So here are the posts that are featured for this week:

Life Cycle Art from Minnie Monets and Mommies

Alligator Printable Pack from Mommyhood in Holland

Montessori Inspired Butterfly – Caterpillar Unit from Living Montessori Now

Dinosaur Color Sorting Activity from Stir the Wonder

Insect Sensory Bin from Rubber Boots and Elf Shoes

This week on The Pinay Homeschooler, I am going to feature our insect studies for the past years. Mavi loves everything about insects.  it is also important that kids understand how to differentiate insects from other creepy crawlers.  Remember, not everything that crawls are insects!  Like spiders, worms and centipedes… they belong to  different groups!  

Welcome to the Learn & Play Link Party!

Now it’s time for this week’s link party! This is a BRAND new link up for all blog posts that include learn and play activities and hands-on education for kids. We are excited to read your blog posts and to see what you have to share! Please link up below and grab our button to display on your blog.

If you are a blogger, share your family friendly posts here. We are looking for things which include:

• Montessori Education
• Homeschool
• Sensory Play
• Tot and Preschool Trays
• Fine and Gross Motor Activities
• Kids in the Kitchen
• Healthy Recipes for Kids
• Arts and Crafts
• Natural Living
• Free Educational Printables
• Family-Oriented Activities
• Healthy Living

Your post will be featured on each of our blogs where we will pick our favourite posts every other week. That means there is more of a chance that you will be featured!

Everyone, please meet our link party hosts:

Christian Montessori Blog ~ Please visit our CMN FB group ~ Pinterest

Vanessa from Mama’s Happy Hive~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jennifer from Study at Home Mama~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Marie from Child Led Life~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Jae from Pinay Homeschooler~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Heather from Golden Reflections Blog~FB~Pinterest~Instagram~Twitter

Renae from Every Star is Different~FB~Pinterest

GUIDELINES FOR LINKING
Please link up 1-3 posts
Follow each of the hosts on social media
When you link up, please add our button and place it at the bottom of your shared posts or link back with text link.
By entering a link, you’re giving us permission to feature an image on our blogs. Proper credit & links will ALWAYS be given.
Please visit a couple of shared posts and leave a comment for them
Remember that you must link back in order to be featured

Grab This Button:

<div align="center"><a href="http://christianmontessorinetwork.com/category/learn-and-play" title="Christian Montessori Network"><img src="http://www.christianmontessorinetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/learn-and-play-link-up-150-150.png" alt="Christian Montessori Network" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Please Follow

Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Pinay Homeschooler on Pinterest.

An InLinkz Link-up