Ant Investigation

For a wide variety of reasons (strengthening our observation skills, learning to use books and the Internet as valuable resources for gathering new information, developing our critical thinking skills through thoughtful conversations, and strengthening our capacity for empathy by taking an ant's perspective) I had secretly wanted to explore ants for a while.  When we spotted a bunch of ants outside the K classrooms, I knew it was the perfect time to (hopefully...assuming the kiddos were interested) begin our new investigation.  We wondered, Why were there so many ants? Where were they all going?  Some of the kids were completely fascinated by what they saw, so we grabbed the iPad to snap a few pictures for reflection when we got inside.

Before we delve into an investigation, I'm always curious to see what the kids know (and/or misunderstand) about the topic.

The arrival of a mysterious box in our classroom piqued the kids' interest and stirred up a lot of excitement about what might be inside.  They guessed it...live ants!

Piggybacking off our last investigation, we could similarly use our skills of observation to notice and learn about the ants.  It was amazing to realize how much we could learn about ants simply from watching them!

We spent a lot of time those first few days looking closely, noticing, and sketching our observations.

Unlike during our Magic Door investigation, we could also find out more about our new topic by looking at books and the Internet.  It's amazing how much you can learn about a topic just by looking carefully at the pictures in a non-fiction book.

Once I was assured the topic was of interest to the students, we began wondering together all about ants.  I've discovered that children's wonders tend to be a lot richer if you dabble in the topic for a while before having them pose questions, and this time proved no different.  I planned to explore some of their wonders in focused ways, while some of the wonders we informally found the answers to as we read and investigated together.

A number of kids wondered about ants' bodies, both inside and out.  Coincidentally, several kids' big wonders at the beginning of kindergarten were about human bodies.  I figured we could merge the two topics, so that's where we began...

Tasty ants and a roll-an-ant game were a great way to solidify our new knowledge about ant body parts - head, thorax, abdomen, legs, mandibles, and more.

As we continued to learn more about ant bodies, we figured out all the parts that ants have in common with humans.  Turns out we're more alike than we had imagined!

The more they observed and sketched our ant farm, the more detailed and exact their drawings became...

In addition to wondering about ant body parts, several kids also wondered what ants like to eat. We got inspired by a picture we saw online of an ant food experiment, so once the rainy days had passed we set up a similar experiment on the playground.

When the kids made their predictions for our graph (a current math skill) they had to explain the reason behind their guesses.  It was fascinating listening to them come up with the words to explain their thoughts (ex: cheese because it's soft, crackers because they can make ant sized crumbs, candy because everyone loves sweet stuff, etc.), and I loved seeing the little wheels turning in their heads as they spoke.  Most of us were pretty sure the ants would go for the sweet stuff, so we were shocked to discover that crackers were the biggest hit of all. 

Next thing you know, ant characters started popping up in their fiction beginning-middle-and-end stories...

I was surprised to discover how popular ant headbands could be!  All it took was some construction paper, pipe cleaners, tape, and a lot of imagination, and suddenly they had organized their own class-wide game of save-the-queen-ant during recess time.  Play is such a powerful way for children to make sense of what they're learning and solidify their new knowledge.

Art projects are another great medium through which young children can learn.  Every time they created an ant they were thinking about ant body parts, colonies, jobs, etc.

Fingerstamp ants and sticky note ants were both big hits.

Two Bad Ants was a perfect fiction story for helping us begin to think about life from an ant's perspective. Taking another's perspective can be challenging for five year olds, but it's such an important life skill. This story also happened to be perfect for helping us strengthen our reading comprehension skills (recognizing the problem and solution) while also modeling for the kids how to make their fiction stories in writing workshop more interesting.  They had mastered the idea of beginning, middle, and end, but often their stories were lacking action/excitement. Together we thought about the problems and solutions in Two Bad Ants, and then...

we created our own stories from an ant's perspective, complete with a problem in the middle and a solution at the end.

Next up we began learning more about what ants actually do.  Turns out that different ants have different jobs...

When you learn new information the best way to commit it to memory is by actually using it. So, each kid decided what job their ant performs and designed clothing/accessories it to reflect that role. We had nurse ants, queen ants, tunnel diggers, a food finders, and lots of soldier ants too.

 

In order to encourage the kids to think critically, they answered the question, "Which ant do you think is most important for the colony?"  I again stretched them to think critically by asking them to explain why.  This question alone led to some of the most rich and thoughtful discussions/debates I have ever heard among kindergarteners.

Ultimately, we agreed that every ant is important.  We likened our realization to St. Anne's and all the people there who perform different (but equally important) jobs to help make our "school colony" work.

Several kids even used their choice time to make accessories for their ant...a sleeping bag and a car, complete with room for an ant friend.

One of the topics we touch upon in our kindergarten social studies/science curriculum is life cycles, so this was a perfect moment to tie that in.  We even learned a song about the lifecycle of an ant.

Once we knew about ant lifecycles and jobs, we had enough knowledge to delve into the topic of ant colonies.  The story Ant City helped us learn all about the tunnels and rooms (chambers) underground.  Together we made a big list of all the places/things ant colonies have, and then each kid was tasked with the job of using what they had just learned to create and draw their own colony.

I was blown away by how hard and long they worked as well as by the amount of knowledge/detail they incorporated as they drew their own colonies.  

Next up it was time to address a child's wonder about different species of ants.  We gathered information about some amazing types of ants (turns out there are over 10,000 species!) via conversations, books, and videos, and the kids reflected on what they had learned in their morning journals.

I had been waiting for the perfect moment to introduce Hey, Little Ant to the kids.  I felt confident at this point in our investigation that they had acquired enough knowledge to think critically about the question this story raises - Is it ever okay to squash an ant?

After reading the story for a second time, I had planned to have the kids split up into two groups for a debate based on whether or not they thought it was okay to squash an ant.  To my surprise, not a single kid thought it was okay...so I shifted gears and came up with a new plan. We realized that even though some of us used to think it was okay, now that we knew so much about ants our perspective had changed.  Since we had become the ant experts, it was now our job to help teach everyone else. We created a letter to hang up in the hallway listing all of our reasons, and we included some important picture clues for the non-readers in the building.

We learned a song called Please Don't Step on Me to go along with our empathy building activity, and then we turned our letter into a short video to help teach "the world."

Next we delved into the topic of anteaters, and we used a thinking tool called a bubble map to keep track of the relevant information we learned through books and a short video.  Now that our literacy skills are getting stronger, thinking maps will become very important tools in our future investigations.  Did you know an anteater's tongue is two feet long?  We took out a ruler, and the kiddos were shocked to discover how long two feet actually is!

We separated all of our ant books into two piles...a fiction pile and a non-fiction pile, and we even realized some books can be a little bit of both.  

As we separated the books, we realized there was one last ant book we hadn't read yet. This seemed like a perfect moment for the kids to begin learning how to research and record interesting facts.  

Ever since we had drawn our own ant cities, several kids kept talking about wanting to make a 3-dimensional one. This seemed like it could be a perfect culminating activity, so we gave it a try. The kids thought of all the things our colony would need to seem realistic, they signed up for different jobs, and they got to work.  In pairs (or small groups) they collaborated to create ants, 2 and 3-dimensional tunnels, an anthill, an anteater, and the top surface of the ant colony. 

Then we added our labels and voila...what a masterpiece, both inside and out!

As a final step, each child reflected on their hard work using an app they learned about in their technology class called Explain Everything.   

What a perfect final project to set out in the kindergarten commons to share with the other classes and to remind us all about ants.