Bugs! It's summer! They're everywhere! Enjoy 'em!
Grandma Campers indulged themselves in the world of bugs this year, welcoming them by the swarm. Those curious and often creepy critters offer a world of intrigue for study in several categories of interest: biology, engineering, and art.....
Let's put a magnifying glass on the activities we explored!
Library learnin' is the basis for all successful endeavor. We took a studied look at a fascinating inventory of bugs - large, small, fierce, and friendly. Book based bug chatter focused on a few basic facts: insects (the correct term for "bugs!") have six legs, three main body parts, and most adults have wings. Spiders are not insects; they are arachnids, creatures with eight legs, only two body sections, and no wings. We'll save those guys for Halloween!
We determined our favorites: butterflies, ladybugs, and honey bees. Non-faves are mosquitoes, flies, and hornets. We were ambivalent about grasshoppers, moths, and black ants (even though they are "cute and busy" - like we are!). I'll bet you might agree with us on those choices!
Armed with new awareness, we dipped courageously into bags and boxes of wood scraps, small plastic bottles, and caps of various sizes and shapes - all squirreled away by grandma months in advance for this purpose.
We are going to engineer our own bugs!.....
Toothpaste tube cap eyes bulge like the real ones do, and that odd little topper with the pointer makes an excellent proboscis. We needed six long, skinny little legs apiece - making grandma, for the first time ever, grateful for the number of times markers were left uncapped to dry out! (Also appreciative for the amount of cute little round "caterpillar body" pill bottles at our disposal due to the grandfolks dependence on BP meds!)
I found it best to man the hot glue gun at the disposal of my little engineers. They told me where to adhere their choices. In the process, we added an interesting word or two to our vocab: symmetry, for one (try to find a bug that's not a mirror image of itself from side-to-side!), and monochromatic (what grandma's sample bug would have been, save for the blue sparkly wings!).
Snack Break and Bug Census
We took a bug break next, nibbling on an array of veggie sculpted ants and dragonflies perched on cracker rounds. (See Nature's Path for the cutest collection ever!) And then into the woods we marched, paper sacks and magnifying glasses in hand. The latter helped us find 'em - often in their hiding places beneath leaves and under sticks. The former served our census inventory - every time we spotted a bug we popped a small stone into them. It was fun to sort and count back home on the deck, chattering away about our finds!
Fingerprint Art
My fun find at Rays of Bliss blog served us well as a guide sheet for the Bug Books we created next. Each little lady received six sheets of white paper and two light cardboard covers, all 6" square. Choosing from this delightful chart, each page featured a colorful winged friend. We tied our books together with a slip of ribbon through holes punched in left top corner and carried home a sweet memory of "Bug Day" at Grandma Camp!
Ava completes a pretty blue butterfly on one page of her book.
Grandma Camp late evenings find us still up, even at 10 P.M. It's a privilege we enjoy in anticipation of traditional "Night Hikes." Venturing out after dark as a brave flashlight-toting team offers thrills and chills and opportunities to observe things that aren't visible in the glare of summer's vibrant daylight. Weird bugs, for instance. Like the plethora of moths we attracted on the white sheet we draped over a fence, spotlit by a flashlight. Boy, did those critters show up in droves! And while we avoided reaching in to "pet them," it was fun to observe different sizes, shapes, and colors!
Such a cute and fun idea for very little cost!
ReplyDeleteThis is a such a fun adventure, but it also had such an amazing learning opportunity as well. I was impressed when I saw the picture of the bug, but I didn't realize you had created all the parts. I looked at it and thought it was legos or some type of building materials. I didn't realize Grandma Joyce had created an original insect. Impressive as always. When your grands are adults, they will gather at family celebrations and will vie for who can respond to 'do you remember when.' You are certainly making life-long memories. Judy
ReplyDeleteThis is fabulous, my friend. Such creative use of stuff you'd typically throw away. And those kiddos are SO engrossed in Grandma's activities for them. You are an inspiration. ♥
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