Crawling Creatures: What Is An Insect?

The children recalled what they know about ants from last week's study.

Sofia offered "Some bugs eat wood. For example, my door is made out of wood and it would eat it in one minute!"

"Those are Carpenter Ants." said Jayla

While reading "What Is An Insect" by Susan Canizares the children saw examples of animals that are insects and those that are not. When the book identified a centipede as not an insect Alfie disagreed, "Yes it is!"

 Upon further research we learned that insects have 3 body parts and 6 legs, centipedes do not have these so they are not insects. Then what are they?  We will investigate this another day.

Another example of a creature that is not an insect are spiders.

The children discovered they have two body parts and eight legs.

Jayla added, "Spiders are different than people because they drink fly's blood."

The book "Spider Names" introduced the children to many types of spiders.

"I know tarantula's." said Lucas 

Zoe wants to know "Do spiders eat people?"

"Are spiders dangerous?" wondered Eva

"Whoa! They have four eyes!" exclaimed Alfie

It seems we have more to learn about spiders!

The children made spiders by tracing their hands and sticking them together to create a spider.

They named the type of spider they made:

Ice Guy Spider - Alfie

Insect Spider - Sofia

Insect Spider - Jayla, because my spider is the same kind as Sofia's

Ant Spider - Eva

Sea Spider - Zoe

Sea Tarantula - Lucas

Big One Spider with Carpenter Ants crawling all over it - Sasha