Exploring Nature With Children: Ants and other insects

As I’ve spoken about before, we are following the brilliant Exploring Nature With Children curriculum for our nature study. This weekend was designated “ant week”, and I thought we would take the week to read and talk about insects in general alongside ants specifically (avoiding caterpillars and butterflies – last week and next week respectively – and bees which we will be studying in June).

This week I didn’t plan any specific activities as our week was quite full, but we have been enjoying looking at the ants and other bugs we’ve found in our garden and on our walks.

This week we used the following books:

• Ants (part of the My First Discoveries series) This whole series is amazing and this book does not disappoint. We’ve (both!) learnt so much from this super book, and I’m really glad I bought it – even if I was slightly sceptical at first about buying a book just about ants…
• Insect Detective I love this, it’s brilliant – just like all the others in the Nature Storybooks series.
• Insect Emporium Truly beautiful drawings of insects!
• The Ladybird I know I’ve written about this before but it’s such a great book on our little spotty friends.
• First Facts: Bugs A great, simple introduction to insects, arachnids, and other creepy crawlies.
• Bugs DK Mini Encyclopedia My mum found this book second hand and it’s been great for this week!
• 1001 Bugs to Spot Still a favourite. I must see if I can get more in this series as Frida really loves this.
• The Natural History Book If you have young nature lovers in the home you need this. We use it pretty much daily!

We played the brilliant Bug Bingo; Frida now enjoys playing it “properly” but for younger children it would make a great matching game, and we have learnt so much from it. We also have Bird Bingo from the same series and it’s great – there is also a dog, cat, and monkey version!

I made up some cards for us to use during morning time using digital downloads: these lovely insect fact cards (she also sells beautiful cards and printables on the moon, mushrooms, birds, leaves… too many to list here!), these ant life cycle cards, and these parts of an ant nomenclature cards.

These free to download critter cards from Little Oak Learning would also make a great resource, memory game, or decoration.

Writing this post has made me wonder if I should write my plans each week for Exploring Nature With Children at the beginning of the week rather than at the end? I’m just aware that for those of you who are following the curriculum too ideas for resources might be more welcome at the start? Let me know your thoughts! 

If you liked this post you might enjoy Exploring Nature With Children: Caterpillars and Exploring Nature With Children: Grasses