Minibeasts

For the first part of this term we have been looking into the life and characteristics of insects and spiders. We have learnt about the body parts of an insect and the body parts of a spider. We have looked at life cycles of some common insects and found out some interesting facts. We discovered among other things, that spiders are not an insect!
Along our learning journey we came up with some questions:
1. What are those things on the back of an earwig and do they sting you?
2. How far do Grasshoppers jump?
3. Do ladybugs bite?
4. How fast do ladybugs fly? and
5. What do butterflies eat?
We used books, and the computers to find the answers to our questions. 
Did you know that...

• Those things on the back of an earwig are 'nippers' and the earwig uses them to catch food. Little bugs are usually what it eats. They can use these nippers to grab onto your finger if they are angry but they do not sting you.
• An adult grasshopper can jump 10 times it's body length straight into the air or 20 times it's length horizontally.
• Lady bugs have biting mouth parts but will not bite you. Their first line of defence is actually to bleed on you! So if it looks like a lady bug has urinated on you - that is actually blood.
• Lady bugs can beat their wings 85 times a second and they can fly 24 kms an hour.
• Butterflies eat nectar from flowers.

Once we had this information we then used the 'Puppet Pals' app on the iPads to present our new knowledge.

For the children to use Puppet Pals there was a huge amount of learning going on: They were taking photos, choosing backgrounds, selecting and trimming the photos, positioning and resizing their photos on the screen, reading their written  facts and recording their voice. Of course all of this, while remembering what buttons to press, how to get back when a mistake was made, how to move on to the next stage and making sure the headset microphone was in the correct place for recording.  Not to mention the reading and speaking skills! 
 All this completely independently
The only thing I did was take some head shot photos ... a few children even chose to take their own selfie. You can be very proud of your children.  Watch our movie below so we can share our learning with you. 
Room 3 You Rock!!