Ant Trails

This pregnancy has enabled me to look at home education in a whole new light.  I ask myself almost daily, “Just how well can we educate and never leave home?” While not on bedrest, I am still pretty homebound and I’m learning that the answer to the question is “Very well, indeed.”

Our nature study is happening right in our own yard.  I’m not sure for how long this will work, but so far, so good.  I was checking out the cherry tomatoes the other day and discovered a whole mess of ants. (How’s that for a scientific term?  A whole mess.).  I figured we could get at least a week’s worth of meaning out of a whole mess. In incidentally, did you know that there are 10,000,000,000,000,000--that's ten million billion--ants in the world?  In fact the are more ants than all the rest of the insects put together (Fun With Nature Take-Along Guide)

First we consulted the ultimate science expert, Ms. Frizzle.  The Magic School Bus did indeed get ants in its pants.  I love the little notebook entries sprinkled throughout Magic School Bus books.  They make great copywork.  I have my children copy them to index cards and make accordion fold mini-books for lapbooks with them.

While the children were copying the work of Ms. Frizzle’s students, I consulted one of my go-to nature experts, Sy Montgomery.  I bought a couple of her books several years ago, upon the advice of my absolute favorite naturalist in the whole word, MacBeth Derham.  These volumes, The Curious Naturalist and The Wild Out Your Window, are my books.  I have so enjoyed just reading nature writing for adults. (I’ve enjoyed it so much that I incorporated it into my son’s high school learning—but that’s a post for another day.) 

Montgomery suggested that we put just a tiny dab of nail polish on one ant and spend some time watching him carefully.  How long does it take to find and move a crumb? Run your finger across a path the ant is taking.  What happens?

Okay, now, how to gather the ants up and look at those famous tunnels?  The Kids’ Nature Book suggests making an ant farm.  No patience for that, I’m afraid. Michael was dispatched to Toys R Us to purchase an inexpensive one. Then, we followed the directions in The Kids’ Nature Book to use our ants to fill the farm (no patience to wait for ants to come in the mail, either.).  Now, we can watch for tunnels and observe workers and eggs and larvae as pictured and described in One Small Square: Backyard.

There is an entire chapter on ants in Discover Nature Close to Home.  Elizabeth Lawlor suggests more activities for observation, but she also offers quite a bit of content for my older children. I read to them about the survival and the science of ants and this made perfect fodder for narration. Then, we looked carefully at the anatomy of ants and drew detailed, labeled pictures. These, I made into three part booklets for the lapbook. We learned how to tell an ant from a termite (information that makes a great Venn diagram) and more than I ever thought I’d know about grooming, hygiene, and social habits of ants.  We also learned why ants love aphids so.

No nature trail is complete without some picture books books.  Here are the books in the “Ant Basket”:

Thinking About Ants (Barbara Brenner)
Ant Cities (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2) (Arthur Dorros)

Two Bad Ants (Chris Van Allsburg)
The Little Red Ant and The Great Big Crumb (Shirley Climo)

The Ant and the Grasshopper (Amy Lowry Poole,Aesop)

Are you an Ant? (Backyard Books) (Judy Allen)

Comments

[Marybeth]

That's a lot of ants in the world. (10,000,000,000,000,000)

[Dawn]

Elizabeth, thanks again for entering this post in Field Day. Great ideas and I love the ant basket!! :)

[Theresa]

Elizabeth, this is fantastic!!! I don't know why I missed this when you first posted it, but I'm glad I finally caught it. I've never had luck with an ant farm (also too impatient to wait for ants in the mail) but I am inspired by this to give it another try. I really need some more nature study books, too (can we ever have enough?LOL?) so I'm going to look into your recommendations. Thanks again!