Gone Buggy!

We spent two week learning about insects and we had an absolute blast!  It is one of my favorite units that we do in Kindergarten.  

We started off by creating our Insects Schema Chart.  Throughout the unit, we recorded our new learning and moved things from our schema over to misconceptions.  For example, at the beginning of our unit we thought that worms were insects.  Then we learned that insects have three main body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen), six legs, and compound eyes.  We then had to move our "worms are insects" sticky note to misconceptions.  

We learned that most insects have compound eyes.  This makes them see the same pictures hundreds of times.  We took a look through some bug viewers and recorded what we saw.  We decided that it would be pretty hard to see using compound eyes.  That is why insects have to rely so much on their other senses.  

We studied a lot of different insects over the two week unit, but one of our favorites was the bee.  We did a really fun experiment to help us figure out exactly how bees spread pollen.  We each wore a bee finger puppet like the one below.  

We had to fly around the room and land on flowers.  We would drink our nectar from the middle of the flower (represented by cheetos).  The cheetos would leave dust on our fingers (the cheeto dust represented the pollen).  When we flew to another flower, the cheeto dust left a mark.  By the end of the experiment our flowers were covered in cheeto dust or "pollen".  This showed us exactly how bees spread pollen!  It was a lot of fun!  

During our insect unit, we did an Eric Carle author study.  A lot of his books are about insects.  We read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "The Grouchy Ladybug", "The Very Quiet Cricket", and many more!  We learned a lot about Eric Carle and his style of writing.  One of our favorite things we learned is that he spends part of his time in the hills of North Carolina.  Too cool!