Teaching Kids About Bugs
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| Monarch butterflies can be found on milkweed and other garden flowers. They offer a great opportunity to talk to kids about the life cycle of insects. |
By Charlie Nardozzie
If you're looking for some fun, educational activities to do with your kids this summer, look no further than the flower or vegetable garden. While kids sometime need to warm up to appreciating plants, they are immediately engaged by bugs. Granted, some kids are more repulsed than attracted by insects, but most kids, especially younger ones, have a fascination with insects that offers you an opportunity to teach and play outdoors with your kids.
The first task is to find some bugs. If you're growing vegetables in your garden, potatoes, brassicas, and greens are good places to start. Look for Colorado potato beetle adults on your potato and eggplant plants. The adults are big, so kids can find them easily. Talk about the life cycle of an insect. Ask your kids to find the eggs (orange masses on the underside of leaves) and the larvae (soft red insects on the leaves). Talk about how the insect changes and the role each stage of growth plays in its life.
Check out the broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, or kale plants and look for the cabbageworm. Look for translucent single eggs on the bottom side of leaves, and green caterpillars on the leaves. Ask kids to find the black droppings and talk about how insects will leave signs behind in addition to their feeding. Try to find an adult cabbageworm (white butterfly) and talk about how this insects goes through a metamorphosis and changes from caterpillar to butterfly. Check other plants, such as milkweed (monarch butterfly) and parsley (black swallowtail butterfly), to find caterpillars that may change into butterflies. Collect some caterpillars in a jar and have the kids watch as the butterflies change form over time.
Look for aphids on the young leaves of greens. Talk about how this insect doesn't change like the caterpillars; the young look very similar to the adults. They have yet another type of life cycle.
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