One thing my three year old grandson is completely enthralled with is bugs.
What do you do if you have a kid who loves bugs? You find a book about some bugs and spend lots of time playing with pretend bugs and looking for real bugs too! You can’t take my grandson anywhere and expect him to walk faster than a snail because he is always looking for bugs and stopping to point them out. I can’t remember the last summer where I spent so much time looking at bugs!
Finding some Bugs of our own
We have found ant hills in the grass, Pill Bugs (rolly polly) in the driveway, butterflies fluttering everywhere, and spiders in the windows of our detached garage.
And on one afternoon, a caterpillar literally dropped out of the sky (one of the trees) and landed in my lap.
I let my grandson keep the caterpillar in a jar over night so we could learn a little bit about it.
Letting the Bugs Go
Then the next day, we found a tree and let the caterpillar go.
The caterpillar crawled way up high until we couldn’t see it any more.
A Book and an Activity about Bugs
With so much attention on bugs, I searched for a fun children’s book to add to my classroom and found the book titled, “Some Bugs” by Angela DiTerlizzi. “Some Bugs” is filled with wonderful illustrations and simple text of all kinds of bugs, many of which we recognized from all of our recent bug hunts. I also set out some of my DIY lid bugs for play.
It didn’t take long before my grandson spotted the new bug book and we sat down together to read it. And just like he does when we are walking outside, he stopped and pointed at almost every bug in the book.
The book is filled with LOTS of descriptive vocabulary commonly associated with the way a bug moves or looks or sounds such as “crawl, flutter, buzz” and so on.
After reading our book, my grandson spent a little time over at the water tub dishing up a few bugs for play.
There are many ways I will be able to build on his interest of bugs over the summer and I find it lots of fun to find new books and interesting bugs to explore with along the way.
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