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!

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

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!

The World of Arthropods for Kids (Part Two)

This is the second part of our Arthropod Study.  I suggest you read the first part of this post to know more about our learning materials and how I started introducing this entire subject to my son.

Here are the activities we've done on the last part of our Insect Study.
Activity 1:  Moulding insects using plasticine and playdough.


Activity 2: Matching the insect figures to the insect picture cards we have. Also, we used our fact cards to learn about each insect group and their characteristics.
 

Activity 3: Body parts.  Here Mavi worked on a worksheet identifying the major body parts of an insect.
 
Activity 4: Sorting of insect and non-insect animal figures.  Oh he loved this!! See how he identifies the figure? He sorted them by counting their legs!
 

Activity 5:  This is just out of the blue activity.  I was cleaning up our kitchen and saw Mavi's old learning materials in a box.  So I took them out and let him play with these minibeasts again.  We had this activity before when he was 3 years old, picking up the insects using the kiddie chopsticks.  The toy insects were from a local store here.


And that ends our Arthropods-Insect Study :)  Next is Crustaceans and Centipedes, but I'm reserving this topic in July or August. 

And there you go peeps! If you have any questions just leave me a comment and I will get back to you as soon as I can.  You are free to share this post and copy the activities (just link back to me if you find my activities interesting).

For more activities: Follow Pinay Homeschooler's board Zoology Unit on Pinterest.

Linking to:

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TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!

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.

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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Insect Themed Learning Trays for Toddlers

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

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.

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
 

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