It's a bugs life

Monday 28th of May 2018,

Children are naturally curious about their world and enjoy exploring their surroundings. Because of their inquiring minds, children are eager to know why things are the way they are and will ask many questions about their immediate environment. On a recent nature walk children could be heard asking, "I wonder what is under the rocks?" "What is that bird eating?" "Does that flower smell?" and "Why are the ants fighting?" Childhood is the time to encourage and nurture early interests in nature.

By incorporating nature education into the curriculum, teachers can help children find answers to their many questions. They can help to develop inquiring minds, curiosity, and wonder. The hope is that children who experience nature education will develop positive attitudes about themselves, natural life, and the earth. Because we face so many environmental crises, the study of nature is even more critical today. It is because nature study concerns itself with living organisms children to living things and to support their curiosity, exploration, and understanding. The intent is to encourage in children an interest in the diversity, beauty, and joy of natural life and an understanding of the importance of the interrelationship of living things.

The topic of seasons and the weather can be included as supporting information within the context of the settings being studied. 

Here, we created a sensory tray filled with chick peas and dry split green peas. We added magnifying glasses and hid plastic bugs into the tubs for discovery. We observed the children sorting and grouping objects by colour, shape, size, type and using supporting language to describe what the bug looked like, it’s features and where we could find these in nature. Similar to play dough, there is much experimenting children can do with a bean tub. This open-ended activity is perfect as a calming activity that can be used during free play time.

Sometimes we directed or started the play especially to encourage a more varied and complex play and other times the children played using their own ideas and ones they had learnt from sessions, friends and influences around. The children came about this activity as we found some ladybugs upstairs and wondered where they came from.

Scientific literacy is essential in today’s society. By enabling young children to investigate the living world, we will help them build confidence, broaden their interests, develop scientific thinking skills, and build knowledge. As part of our program, we wanted to explore bug life as an extension of our exploration of the seasonal changes.

We will extend this experience by exploring bugs in more depth with caterpillars, worms, bees, butterflies and tadpoles. We will explore varied environments, for children to better understand the impact different conditions have on bug life and what lives in a particular habitat, what cannot, and why.