Crawling Creatures: Wood Bugs

While classifying centipedes last week the children learned that wood bugs belong to the same family - myriapods. The children find, collect, and hold these little creatures in the forest everyday and are curious to learn more and what better way than to make a Wood Bug habitat in the classroom!

Wood Bug Puppet

We examined a diagram of a wood bug and noticed it has an oval body with many legs. The children attempted to draw these shapes to make a puppet

Wood Bug Habitat

To keep the wood bugs alive and healthy we need to know what kind of environment wood bugs like to live in and what they eat. We researched and discovered:

• They're mainly scavengers, eating mainly decaying plants and small animals. 
• They like moist environments
• They are helpful because they eat decayed plant material, ridding the environment of rotting plant matter
• They help loosen the soil as they crawl through it, making more space available for roots to grow

Caring For Creatures

The children identified rules that needed to be remembered while handling and examining the wood bugs. Tomorrow we will collect wood bugs for the habitat and they will present these rules to the children in the other groups and invite them to examine wood bugs during general play times.

Wood Bug Rules Bug Rules

We can:

pick them up

hold them

look at them

play with them

take care of them

We can't:

throw them

squish them