Hi! Future Ticia 2025 here, I’m updating this old fireflies lesson from back when my kids were in kindergarten and making it a bit more useful for everyone, and making this a super fun science lesson for you to do with your early elementary kids. I’ll be popping in from time to time as past Ticia 2011 talks about my fireflies lesson for early elementary kids and all the things we did.
This past week we’ve read about all sorts of beetles, from ladybugs to fireflies. As soon as I realized we were studying them I tried to look up to see if there was any sort of experiment to explain how they light up.
(future Ticia says I’ve added affiliate links)
I came up with nothing. I saw lots of “go out and count how many fireflies you see,” type of thing, but we don’t really have them here in Texas.
So, I decided instead to have us be pretend fireflies. This worked out super well because one of the episodes of “The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That” was about fireflies so we incorporated that as well.
Let’s talk firefly videos!
Hi! Future Ticia 2025 coming here, since we now have YouTube and videos to share things, and I would be very surprised if the exact video we watched is NOT available. Give me a minute to search up a few things…
And if you don’t want to watch an entire “30 minute” episode, then here’s a 6 minute video talking about how fireflies work.
Okay, now let’s get back to past Ticia 2011.
Firefly activity
I stopped by the Dollar Store and picked up glowsticks for us to simulate the glow of fireflies as they lit up to attract mates (and picking up a bulk pack of glowsticks is always a good idea because glowsticks are cool and a great way to make kids very excited as will become evident in my pictures).
First we got our glowsticks and broke them. Or rather the kids attempted to, and I ended up breaking them.
Then we went down to our local elementary school playground and took turns flashing our lights to signal different things. The boys refused to flash their lights to get a girl to come to them because, and I quote, “I don’t want the girl to come and eat me.” That teaches me for telling them about how some females eat the males of their species.
But, they had a lot of fun flashing their lights to warn about spider webs, or other dangerous things. I, of course, was the spider. Why do I always get to be the bad guy?
And, of course, we had to try out the cool effect of waving them around in the complete darkness.
Seriously though, the glowsticks were probably a lucky find for explaining fireflies because just like the fireflies’ glow, it’s a chemical reaction and it doesn’t heat up like our lights do. It’s a very efficient process as far as energy conversion goes.
Firefly picture books
The final time Future Ticia 2025 is going to pop in, but I wanted to tell you about picture books that would go well with this lesson.
Our lesson was mainly because this was the next chapter in our science textbook, Apolgoia Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, but there are also some fun picture books, both fiction and nonfiction. So, let me look at what my library has (and I know there’s a fun Eric Carle book).
- Light the sky, firefly– a fun quick nonfiction book about the lifecycle of fireflies
- Little Firefly: an Algonquian legend– oh, I missed grabbing this one, but I love legends like this, so I need to go find it
- The Very Lonely Firefly– part of the World of Eric Carle, we all have fond memories of this book
- Then whatever random Fireflies nonfiction book your library has, my library had about 3 or 4 all named Fireflies, that were more or less the same
There is a downside to this experiment: Now, the kids are trying to convince me I need to let them walk around with me forever. Oh well.
Have you ever had a lucky find that worked well for you? I love finding those from time to time.
Let’s check out some other early elementary ideas
- Mortimer’s First Garden
- How do seeds travel?
- Chores your preschooler should do
- Preschool Calendar Time
- Homemade memory games
Photo by Jerry Zhang on Unsplash
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