Walk Like and Insect

Reading school books can be boring. Everyone knows this. Memorizing a bezillion facts can be tedious and usually the memorization is only temporary at best. Few kids truly retain the bulk of their education. I have found that when the kids are having fun and reinforcing things outside of the box that they truly remember it for the long term. Because of that we try to do something crazy and fun at least a couple times a week.

Right now our Science segment is on Insects. To be honest, none of us are all that big of a fan. It's ranked slightly above Plants and the Human Body both of which we struggled to complete last year. We're more Earth Science, Technology, Chemistry and Physics fans than that of the Biologies, and with exception to First Aid, that seems to be a pretty true fact for ALL the TERDS. But alas, somethings you just got to learn anyway, so insert a little fun......

Topics being studied
Insect anatomy - Parts of an insect and Parts of insect legs. Plus how insects move and how they walk up those walls without falling.

What you need
3 kids and a roll of duct tape (you know those 2 go hand and hand! LOL)

The Project
Begin with a discussion of the insect parts. We covered this earlier with a basic print out from Enchanted Learning. In this project we reinforced this with Bethany modeling our "head", Hope sitting in as our "thorax", and Roman as our obvious "abdomen". We reviewed all the basic parts. This time we went into more detail regarding insect legs though, identifying each of the 3 leg parts and how they function together.

Next the kids lined up in order of their designated insect part to create our insect model. 3 kids with 2 legs = 1 6-legged insect ready to go!

Now, insects do not walk like us humans. It is very different actually and very coordinated. There are actually various patterns that different types of insects walk in. To designate which leg moves we first need to label them. Right legs will be R1-3 starting from front to back and left legs L1-3 also from front to back. Now we walk.... R1, R3, L2, R2, L1, L3......

One thing they quickly learned is that humans aren't quite as coordinated as insects, but then we had to remind them that a real insect only has one brain to coordinate all those legs, not 3. In the end their attempts to walk like an insect tended to end up like this:

However they had a lot of fun trying and they have a new found appreciation for bugs!

You're probably wondering where the duct tape came into play noticing we did not actually duct tape our insect parts together! After this we took duct tape and wrapped around their shoes with sticky side down and let them walk around to get a feel of how insects have sticky pads on the bottoms of their feet that allow them to stick to walls and walk around places that we as humans can not.