So where do I start? LOL
Arthropods, is quite a huge subject, especially for little ones who's exposed to this for the first time. To them, there's only insects. But now, here I am explaining to my son that everything he sees that's not a mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian or fish is an insect. And just like those vertebrates, insects are just part of a much bigger group that is called Arthropods.
Materials Used:
The Animal Kingdom Chart (Arthropods) by The Pinay Homeschooler. I am giving the master chart for free together with the definition cards and sorting activity. The chart activities together with the rest of the pack are included in a bundle. It is available for purchase from my shop, "
The Arthropods Learning Pack".
Arthropod Cards. I am giving away the common insect nomenclature and fact cards for free. Again, the entire arthropods cards will be included in the
Learning Pack bundle.
Animal Lifecycle Cards. We used this to identify insects that undergo incomplete metamorphosis (grasshopper) and complete metamorphosis (butterfly).
Animal Figures. All are from
Safari Ltd Insect TOOB and
Safari Ltd Butterflies TOOB.
Books used (affiliates), please refer at the end of this post.
Activity 1: Presentation of the Arthropod Chart
To introduce the Arthropods, I presented the Animal Kingdom Chart -> Arthropods to Mavi. He's already familiar with this as we have had
Animal Kingdom lessons previously. Now I just have to explain, that similar to the Chordates, Arthropod is a group composed of different species like crabs, centipedes, millipedes, spiders and insects.
He loves the chart! It helped that we did
The Animal Kingdom before :) As you can see in the picture, we worked on sorting the animal figures according to the description cards which is included in my printable. You need not worry if you don't own any of these, I included picture cards in the files so you can still conduct this activity.
I let him read the description cards and he investigated whether the descriptions are indeed true! Like the number of legs, whether they have antennae or if they have indeed body/thorax/abdomen composition.
As you can see, our little Vito is quite interested with what we do as well!
We first looked into the group of Insects
Activity 2:
Life cycles. There are two lifecycles which we discussed here. First, the one with incomplete metamorphosis like grasshoppers (egg->nymph->adult) and the complete metamorphosis like ladybugs (egg->larvae->pupa->adult). You can get a copy of my
ANIMAL LIFECYCLES HERE.
Activity 3: Body parts. Here we looked into the body parts of the insects and how each of these parts differ. Like how does the wings of a butterfly differ from that of the grasshopper and dragonfly. The difference between the shape of the abdomens of each insect etc.
Activity 4: Books. We read a lot of books! And my son loves matching our animal figures to those in the books!
And that ends the first part of our study. More coming up in the next post,
The World of Arthropods for Kids (Part Two)!
PS. I did not proof-read my post. Please understand that I breastfeed and babysit while I write and sometimes, my brain is faster than my fingers. So if you encounter typo/grammar errors, my bad and my apologies. I just have no time to read-proof, thus the reason why I place as much pictures as I can to demonstrate our activities without too much explanation. Thank you for your understanding!
For other activities:
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