Rainbow Connection: Ants in Your Pants

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Ants in Your Pants

From egg to larva to pupa to ant and then it starts all over again- that's the life cycle of an ant. We learned quite a bit about ants from the book,

Are You an Ant?

We had an "ant"ymologist lab set up at our science table for exploring and discovering with a microscope, magnifying glass, plenty of ants- big and small, complete with ant eggs and larva and charts to show the parts of an ant's body and the life cycle of the ant.

At our math table, we counted out ants to place on the corresponding ant hill...

One of our sensory bins was filled with sand. We built ant hills and tunnels as if the ants had built them and placed, pretend ants, eggs (beans) and larva (pipe cleaners) among them for some pretend play.

We talked about the body parts of an ant and then choosing between black and red, we painted the head, thorax and abdomen of our own egg carton ants complete with eyes and antennas. Most of us chose to use both colors.

We created habitats for ants by constructing tunnels on mound shapes. We added beans for eggs, pipe cleaners for larva, and cotton balls for pupa. We glued big and little ants, marching in and out of the tunnels. Such a great activity for language and...

quite interesting results!

After reading, Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?

Image result for who took the cookie from the cookie jar

and finding out it was the ants who did it, we did an experiment to see what ants like to eat. We were each given a paper plate where we place a variety of foods that we thought an ant might like. We even had some chocolate chip cookies (like in the book) to see if they really liked them.

We put them in a place where we know ants like to hang out. It was like a picnic for the ants!

We "checked them out" after quiet time. The ants did not disappoint. They seemed to like pretty much everything we put on the plates- even the chocolate chip cookies!