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.

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!

Montessori Inspired Tweezing Insects Activity

We started off our Insect Unit this week by tweezing insects from the grass.