Snips and Snails and Puppydog Tails

This weekend, a kindergarten insect project turned into a family project. Caleb’s assignment was to pick an insect, any insect he wanted, and build it using things we had in the house. Then he had to write out what he used for each insect part (head, thorax, abdomen, etc.), and he had to learn enough about the insect to be able to write 3 factual sentences about it.

Well, first the child wanted to build a mosquito (eeeeeew, yuck, who wants to build a little bloodsucker like that?!), then a “thorn bug” (they’re actually pretty cool looking, but we couldn’t find much in the house that was conducive to thorn bug building), and then finally settled on doing a “flyerfly” (as he called it) or lightning bug.

Well, I could get Caleb as far as getting out the crafty stuff we have, and saving a couple toilet paper rolls, but after that, I drew a blank on how to actually construct the thing. Enter Dad with his creative and engineering skills. With the help of some construction paper, pipe cleaners, and the hot glue gun, Dad and Caleb put together a pretty stellar looking lightning bug! (Yeah, my baby’s pretty darn handy to have around!) While the assembly was going on, Jacob and I helped look up some interesting facts on lightning bugs (e.g., did you know that not all lightning bugs light up? I think that was my favorite discovery of the weekend–discovered by Jacob, of course!)

With the bug building finished late Saturday night, Sunday afternoon was used  for (among other things) the report writing. Caleb’s three factual sentences, in his words were: “Flyerflys are weged bedtls. A flyerflys liyt can be yellow green or liyt red. Not all flyerflys liyt up.” (Note: their teacher encourages them to spell words phonetically, since at this age, their vocabularies far outstretch their spelling abilities. And yes, being the anal copyeditor type that I am, I had to sit on my hands to keep from fixing all those words for him. We wanted his teacher to know that he really did the work!)

Since we had rainy weather all weekend, we decided the safest way to get Mr. Firefly to Mom’s house last night and then to school on Monday was to put him in a shoe box to keep him from getting wet or crushed. (Thankfully, Dad’s suggestion of punching holes in the box so the bug could breathe was not heard by the boys, so we were able to forego that “necessity.”)  The project was to be turned in today, and the kids were going to get to present their bugs to the class, so I can’t wait to hear how it went!