 Dorothy Floyd, BA (Hons) Cantab |
School Topic Ideas |
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| Insect Anatomy An easy way to teach insect anatomy is to get the children to draw insects. You can point out that insects have the same basic design - six legs, two antennae and a body divided into three parts - head, thorax and abdomen. The six legs are always attached to the thorax. The above paintings have been done by children under 11 years old. If you need some dead stick insects to draw, we always have ones that have died from old age that we can post out to you for minimal cost - contact us for details. |
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| Your suggestions- please keep emailing them to
us! Here are some of your suggestions of how to get the most from keeping insects and snails in schools. Please keep sending them to us, at les@small-life.co.uk |
| A real breakthrough was made when I introduced the adult New Guinea stick insects to the class; they sparked interest in a pupil who has never shown an interest in anything else. I use the excellent insect puzzles from The Bug File as homework for the A level students. It's an excellent way to make them use their knowledge. Thank you for the dead stick insects; the variation amongst them was amazing and when we had finished with them they were passed to the art department where they created much interest. We measured the speed at which our Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches walked across a sheet of A4 paper. We repeated the exercise with the adult male Thailand stick insects. It was fun to do! The Gifted and Talented Group at school have been engaged by your wonderful insects - hopefully more biologists will result! We have 2 CTubes, each containing four Japanese head-shaking caterpillars. We're feeding one lot on privet leaves and the other on lilac leaves and are noting down the growth rates of each. Our school eco-garden has been designed to encourage nature and so we're really looking forward to acquiring the British Peacock butterflies in June to release there. I hope they stick around. We filmed our Stripey Snails overnight. We then speeded up the footage and put it in our website. It's attracted a lot of interest from the parents. It's good to see how the snails move around at night, taking sips from their water dish and sliding up and down the sides of the snail centre. A talented girl whom I feared was starting to "go off the rails" because she was too bored is now firmly back on track, thanks entirely due to the cage of insects I acquired from you. She now has her own set up at home and has taken a real interest in the subject; this has also improved her confidence as well as her behaviour! We have been taping strips of different coloured paper on the outside of the Bug-Cage to see if the Pink Winged stick insects show any preference on where to glue their eggs. So far, we have found that they ignore the red paper but like to stick their eggs on black paper and white paper! Three of the eggs from our Stick Insect Egg Kit have hatched so far and the children are thrilled to have seen part of the stick insects' life cycle. We have a huge bramble bush in the playground and Class 5 are taking excellent care of Stanley (who hatched on my birthday) and the other two. I photocopied some maps of the world with the countries left blank. Using the book "Keeping Stick Insects" by Dorothy Floyd, the children wrote in the names of the countries mentioned in the book: India, Australia etc. As well as showing how widespread stick insects are, I hope this exercise will help the children to remember where the countries are. We have been looking at the shed skins of our classroom stick insects and discussing the advantages of exoskeletons. Although some children found it difficult at first to understand the concept of ecdysis, by using the analogy of a tight jacket I think they understood. We have been looking at stick insect eggs through the microscope and seeing how similar or dissimilar they are to the frass [insect droppings and food debris]. We held a bug quiz! The class was divided up into teams and went to the library to get six questions and answers on bugs. They then asked the rest of the class the questions. This was fun and I think we all learned new bug facts! I have given the children in my class a nature notebook and every day they have to write down an observation they have made when looking at the stick insect cage. This is working really well. We divided our Australian stick insect eggs into two QBOXES and kept them both at the same daytime temperature (variable), but different night-time temperatures (12 degrees and 18 degrees Celsius). After seven months, none of the ones kept at a night-time temperature of 12 degrees Celsius have hatched. But the ones kept warmer at night started to hatch after 4 months! I collected some stick insect skins from your showroom and the students in my art class are using them as a subject for their their fine art exam. We're investigating the preferred substrate for stick insect eggs. We have four Bug-Cages, each containing New Guinea stick insects and a tray divided into four compartments: sand, potting compost, peat and soil. Each cage has the tray rotated by 90 degrees to eliminate position as a factor. I photographed the students holding our different mini-beasts. We then created a collage for the school's open day. This was very well received. We keep Indian stick insects very successfully and are getting some Pink winged stick insects to compare and contrast. See the pattern which newly hatched Thailand stick insects (Baculum thaii) move their legs - I think it's different to other species and so worthy of investigation. |
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