Magic and Mayhem

This week’s theme at Unplug Your Kids is Insect.  We’re getting ready to start a craft I made up and I needed some basic information for the kids to go along with it.  I found these great sites and thought others might like them.

This 4 page PDF file from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is made up for preschool and kindergarten teachers but older elementary kids would love a lot of it too.  It includes crafts, bug games, basic information (pretty detailed!) and more.

Here’s a lesson plan with handouts about insects for older kids.  The handout is fabulous!  I love the idea of having kids draw insects for specific lives like “An insect that eats other insects that live on the top of flowers.”

Here’s a preschool lesson plan for making bugs from playdough and natural materials.

And here’s a nice basic page that tells about what body parts insects have and what they use them for.

If you have a sweet tooth, you could also just make up these too!

We’ve also been trying to spot as many insects as we can lately, and taking pictures of them when we can.  We found a lovely black and yellow beetle on the black eyed susans today that almost disappeared, it blended so well.  Our goal is to photograph or sketch 5 really cool insects we discover.

I’m off now to get to work on our insect craft project though.  I’ll post it with pics when the kids are done.