Insect Lapbook

These last few weeks, I have been co-teaching with our Gifted and Talented Resource teacher. It has been such a fun experience! I have never co-taught before, and we were both nervous about how it would work, but it has been blast. We have similar teaching styles and I love all the experience she has with gifted and talented students. It gave me a good reassurance that things I have done with my kiddos this year were good ones! (Sometimes you need that!) We decided to embark on the wonderful world of insects. We brought in dead bugs to look at under the ELMO, looked around outside for a bug hunt, looked for information in non-fiction texts, and used our favorite Scholastic Readers we received from Donor’s Choose to find information on insects.

We made bugs online here, which the students LOVED! We also found an ant on one of the student’s desk and looked at it under the digital microscope in the computer lab.

Poor little Ant 🙁

It was so neat, and the kids could see EVERY part of the ant. Y’all…the squeals of delight were too precious! I printed out those pictures, and let the students glue them on the back of their lapbook when they were finished.

Our pictures from the digital microscope!

Here is a completed picture of the lapbook!

Our Lapbook!

Where insects are found

Insect/Spider Venn Diagram

Characteristics of insects (notice the XO skeleton …haha)

Front Cover

This was my favorite part of the lapbook! Because my littles are gifted/advanced, any time we discussed a word they did not know before the unit started, they could get a note card and write the “challenge word” on the note card with a definition or picture. My kids opted for the definition, which was great because we were learning about non-fiction text features as well!

You can find the lapbook here in my TPT store. I hope your kids enjoy it as much as mine did!

On Friday, I chose to wrap up the insect theme with a day all about Ants! This ant theme was during my normal day with just my kiddos. Randomly during the day, another teacher came by and told me that a student had stepped on an ant pile by accident, but that you could see the ants carrying their eggs through the tunnels and trying to rebuild. * I’m not gonna lie, it makes me itchy thinking about it however, I LOVE teachable moments, so off we went to take a look! The kids loved it, and I am glad we went for a few minutes!

The ant pile!

Inside the ant pile

Curious little firsties!

They loved it!

After our mini field trip, we came back inside to complete four centers. The kids traveled to each center and completed the activity. Some were completed together in groups, and others were completed by themselves. First we read the book, Hey Little Ant. The students completed a vocabulary sheet that I made. You can find that here. They have matching vocabulary cards to use as well. They wrote what they thought the definition of the word was, and drew a picture.

The next center, they worked on the Scholastic Non-Fiction reader with the corresponding paper that scholastic sends. The focus was Non-Fiction text features, which we have been studying. These Scholastic readers are their FAVORITE. They love them!

The next center was at their seat. They worked on an Ant reading comprehension that I made. You can find that here. I love how this little one said he liked ants because they cut the grass. How cute!

At the last center, the students worked together to find antonyms in the classroom. I found this from TPT made by Rockin in Resource Room. It is a freebie and you can get it here! The kids love to work in groups!

Insects are finished, and we are on to SPRING and all things bunnies, chicks, and eggs! I can not wait! I will be blogging about how I do math groups in my classroom soon. Stay tuned!