An Insect Mini Unit Study
To start off your unit with Insects, a couple of online books in Charlotte Mason style worth looking at and using for narration, copywork, and dictation would be The Insect Folk for little ones up to fourth grade and Insect Adventures for upper level grades.
Some useful readers for younger children would include Christian Liberty Press’ Nature Readers. These are great! If you want to read some fun and quality picture books, try Eric Carle books with all the different kinds of insects who live in them – like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. That’s a great book for looking at metamorphosis as well as beginning counting skills and days of the week for those preschoolers listening in.
A great book for the older kids that I found at my library and is a one of a kind is DK Google e.guides: Insect. This is a great general resource packed with information and online links just about insects.
Let C.P. Ant teach you about insects at http://urbanext.illinois.edu/insects/index.html. This is a fun site with a teacher’s guide.
A fun outdoor activity to try and soon would be planting free sunflower seeds in your garden to attract some bumble bees and then participate in a bee count here http://www.greatsunflower.org/. Sign up soon so you can be part of this activity.
Something we do every year which we never grow tired of is ordering caterpillars to watch while they grow into butterflies. We keep an observational journal and mark down any changes we see from day to day. We label our pictures with the appropriate terms during the metamorphosis. We have a ceremony to release them into our garden and take pictures as they fly off.
To have a fun snack during your unit, try ants on a log or create some of your own bugs out of twinkie snacks or moon pies!
A great set of lapbooks and other resources to tie into your reading and writing can be found here http://www.homeschoolshare.com/connections__insects.php.
Remember to get outside for that nature study, observe your surroundings, and draw what interests you. My younger son only showed signs of any interest in writing when we would go for our nature walks and he drew something that caught his attention. Afterward, he wanted to write the name of it underneath his picture. He would practice sounding out the word and write the letters in his journal. Until that moment, he resisted holding any kind of writing instrument!
