Teachable Moments

I love the curiousity of children. Yesterday we were outside playing and Ari found a bug on the wall. She starts by counting the legs, then she checked to see if it had antennas, a segmented body and wings. She then declares "That's an insect Mommy. It has six legs, 2 antenna, a 3 body parts and wings. What kind of insect is it". I had no idea what kind it was so we grabbed the 2 field guides that I checked out from the library. We started comparing the different insects to the one on the wall. We discovered that it was a Crane Fly. It was cool using so many different critical thinking skills to discover that it was an insect and what kind of insect it was. This led into many more discoveries. We found a fire ant, 4 tent caterpillars and the crane fly.

The caterpillars quickly became the kids' friends. Ari actually kissed her caterpillar goodbye. She named it Daniella and Ryan named his Ryan. Ryan gathered leaves to feed to his caterpillar since we learned that they love to eat. He didn't understand why it didn't goble down the leaf. I was amazed that he thought of the leaf all on his own. They both put their caterpillars on the Diego truck and gave them rides down the driveway. They spent over an hour playing with the caterpillars.