bug project journal #1

We tackled the birds, so logically the bees would come next, right? No, no, I'm not talking sex ed, but project learning, of course! Our bird study was such a resounding success, that we're giving it another go, and for a couple of reasons we opted for bugs as our topic of exploration and discovery. Here's why:

1. We had some exposure to bugs during the bird study-- the robins pecking earthworms out of our yard everywhere we looked, nonfiction books about bird diets-- so it was a logical transference of our attention.

2. Just like the birds in the early spring, the bugs are all over the place in late spring and all summer. Especially mosquitoes. I could do damn observations on those suckers every day from not until October in this area!

3. Earlier in the spring, Red began to FREAK OUT whenever a bug came near her-- screaming, crying, freezing in place (which is really no different than what she does when she gets ticked off about anything, really...), and this was making playing outside a real bummer.

So, a connection to prior learning, availability, and working through a fear seemed to be good enough reasons to take the plunge into a bug study. I have to admit that we started in mid-May or so, but I haven't been as proactive with documenting or setting up experiences so much yet, so the things we have done have been really low-key or pure happenstance. As with the bird study, I want to document in a simple way our experiences on here, bullet-point style and with photos whenever possible. (Again, this beginning post is kinda lame... we'll get moving in a more productive manner soon!)

* I had the good fortune to win a giveaway on the personal blog of a fellow 5M4B reviewer of a bug box, mini-magnifying glass, information book, and a Fandex book about insects. These instantly became the go-to resources for every bug inquiry that Red had. Found a little bug on the sidewalk-- "I gotta go get the bug information books!!" The bug box kit also came with an illustrated chart of common insects that we hung in our work area of the kitchen and have been checking off bugs that we've identified during the study. We're surprisingly up to quite a few as of today:
Ant
Bumblebee
Dragonfly
Fruit fly (damn the fruit bowl in the kitchen!)
Honeybee
House fly
Ladybug
Leaf hopper (three different colored kinds so far-- including a bright, leafy green one-- these are adorable, really!)
Stinkbug (crawling in a friend's house-- thankfully she didn't think I was too weird for getting all excited, capturing it in a cup and calling all the kids over to check it out!)
Mosquito x 10 gazillion (DUH)
Tent caterpillar (more on these later)
Ground beetle
Firefly (yeah for the beginning of June in MD!!)
Earwig (officially my least favorite bug-- there's an awful memory of a ton of them falling out of the pool vacuum pole all over my upper body one summer. BLECH!!)

* We've pretty much just been reading books and noticing bugs everywhere we go- in the yard, on the sidewalks, at the playground, at the bus stop, in the house (yuck-- those get relocated!). Some observations Red has made:
"Lots of tent caterpillars!"
"Bumblebees flying around"
"I found one tiny snail!"
"Lots of slugs in the garden"
"Spiders crawling on their webs"

* In mid-May, Red and JAM started collecting tent caterpillars in the bug box. But, they kept dying. One day we (or more specifically, Mommy) forgot to return the caterpillars to the outdoors and a couple of days had gone by with the box sitting on a shelf forgotten about. When we returned to it, lo and behold, it had actually built a cocoon! A big webby cocoon on the side of the box. There was much rejoicing! As Red says, "We waited and waited and waited and waited!" On 6/3, we noticed that the cocoon had a little hole at the top and a moth was sitting on the little stick that JAM had placed in the box! Red's observation: "It has some black and yellow- a black stripe and yellow wings and yellow crawling legs. And yellow ears!" (Which would be the antennae.) We took some photos and video and sketched the moth together. After JAM and Daddy came home, we all observed it for a bit, but Red was surprisingly agreeable to the idea that we needed to let it go, so it could fly and go find some food. We videoed that process, too, for future reference!

pointing out the small moth

closely observing

our moth friend right there in the middle

explaining her sketch

our sketches, with Red's labeled

* I also pulled out an old, mostly empty blank journal to keep all of our random notes, sketches and observations during this study. Some random notes include:

Red: "Mommy! Come and look what Pudge found- an earthworm!"
Pudge: "Hold it! Hold it!"
After we all took turns holding it, Red: "It's so earthy! It's making my hand all dirty!"
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Red caught a spider in her now empty bug box all by herself! She observed him for a little while, then said she had to let him go back to his family.
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A little while later, she also caught an earwig on her own in the box, and asked me what it was. I asked her how she thought she could figure out what he was, and she suggested we look at her chart. She found him on the chart, "He's got those pincers!"
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We caught a moth that was sitting on our screen door in the middle of the morning. We observed him in the bug box, and Red compared him to the Eastern Tent Caterpillar Moth-- "He has spots. He has a different body- see? He has spots, and the other one was yellow."

That brings us to today. I hope to get some more structure built in to our study in the next week-- maybe a beginning chart of what she already knows and has seen, along with what specific things she'd like to find out about. We've read some basic information books together so far that point out the differences in 'bugs'-- insects, arachnids, and worms/snails/slugs. Maybe we'll have to do some basic comparisons between the 3-segmented insect body with 6 legs and the 2-segmented body with 8 legs of spiders. It was a lot easier to observe birds-- they stayed still for longer, but these little insects are all over the place! We'll see how it goes. Red has already asked if they have bugs at the nature center, so the next step for me is to start finding out about places for field experiences and experts. Yay!


Feeling a little buggy,