Buggin

We had so much fun with our butterfly unit that I decided to keep the insect theme going a little longer.

About halfway through watching our caterpillars turn into butterflies I went online and ordered ladybug larva.  My poor mail lady must be feeling a little concerned about the recent deliveries to our house labeled "Live Insects."  

The ladybugs were fun, but not nearly as interesting as the butterflies.  We learned a lot though, like I had assumed that ladybugs hatched as ladybugs.  No so much.  We were a little surprised when we opened our package and found these long critters crawling in the tube.

It took about two weeks for them to go from larva to adult.  The pupa stage is pretty much just them balled up, but than they open up and are ladybugs.  Over the next couple of days their color darkened up and than we released them.

We covered their life cycle with this cute craft.

Next we moved on to ants.

My kids hate ants.  Mostly because the only ants we are exposed to here in Georgia are appropriately named "Fire Ants" and hurt like crazy when they bite.  And boy do they bite.  If you get near a hill, they all crawl on and then bite at the same time.  It's awful and leaves you with big welps that burn and itch.

We found a ton of great books on ants at the library, did a cute craft, learned the body parts and life cycle in our Ant Observation Book, and ended with an experiment to see what food they liked best.

We wrapped it up with a week of bees.

It was easy to find a ton of books at the library about honey bees, so we read a ton.  Then we did some art with bubble wrap and a honey taste test.  No pictures because I apparently got lazy by the end of our insect unit!