Hi! Future TIcia 2024 here and I’m updating this old Insect Camouflage lesson. It’s a great lesson, and I’d totally forgotten all about it. Actually, I need to mock up and include another one from my public school teaching days because I had the best lesson from that, but this was a great lesson for early elementary as a homeschool science lessons that I couldn’t really do in a classroom. This was part of our Flying Creatures school year, and the Insect Unit (I’m totally going to turn my Insect booklist into an insect unit landing page now). But, now I’m going to turn this back over to Past Ticia 2010.
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So, I saw this idea on a Science Sunday post from Along the Way. I immediately knew I had to do this sometime. Well, this week in our science text we read about how some insects use crypsis (a fancy word for camouflage, which itself is a fancy word for hiding in plain sight).
Insect camouflage lesson supplies
Our science text: Apologia Flying Creatures
- Apologia Flying Creatures notebook (Apologia Flying Creatures Junior Notebook)- I highly recommend this
- Toob animals or other small toys– this is the only thing you ACTUALLY need for this lesson
Insect Camouflage lesson
I had each kid collect 3 small toys (I was going to do this with insects, but I didnโt manage to buy some at the store, so these worked just as well).
Then I started hiding the toys while they theoretically hid their eyes. Yeah, kids donโt do that so well.
While Iโm cleverly hiding the toys in such clever places as under the old baby swing. I made a great discovery, and had to take a break from hiding to talk about an actual real version of an insect doing exactly what we were pretending to do:
Can you find the insect?
Itโs the brown twig-like thing amongst the grass. Thatโs right, I managed to find a walking stick. And the kids had the hardest time finding it. So, we talked about that for a while, and they each got a chance to touch it gently. And then I continued hiding stuff.
And then we found these. You canโt tell in the picture on the left, but that fly-looking thing is almost 2 inches long, itโs HUGE! And that, I found out from someone elseโs post is a cicada casting from when they molted their exoskeleton.
Either way, I still thought both of those were very gross.
My personal favorite was the blue policeman on the blue swing. I had to point him out.
And much like finding Easter eggs my kids are not very observant when looking for stuff. But, they really enjoyed this, and they agreed things like the penguin were easier to find because they didnโt blend in as well. But, the brown dog in the middle of the brown dirt was much harder to find.
Then we talked about why some animals want to be found, and I was impressed because they remembered that it โwas saying donโt eat me, donโt eat me, I taste bad.โ Gotta love the kids way of saying it.
And, then we got a VERY real life example of hiding in plain sight when Princess quite excitedly brought out my wedding ring Iโd carefully put up on the counter to keep it safe while I did some gardening, and then lost it somewhere in my lawn. After spending 3 HOURS searching for it, I still havenโt found it. And 2 of those hours were with another friend and her sonโs metal detector. Tomorrow, Iโm hoping to rent a bigger metal detector and hopefully find it. Seriously, my finger feels weird without it.
Sigh, so things learned this week: bugs use hiding and advertisement to keep from being eaten, and donโt keep jewelry where Princess can reach it. Little magpie.
Hmmm, as I write this on Friday Linky tools is down, so Iโll have to come back tomorrow sometime to add that in.
It’s back up, and I FOUND MY WEDDING RING LAST NIGHT (SATURDAY) USING A HEAPING BIG METAL DETECTOR.
More Great Insect or 1st-Grade Ideas
- Insect KWL Chart
- How do bugs see?
- Insect parts lesson
- Danny and the Dinosaur
- Koala Lou book and activity
Kramthenik27, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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