Turning a Fear of Bugs into a Fascination of Bugs

This group did not like bugs!! They didn’t even like to see pictures of bugs! But we started discussing Cicadas and it all started to change! Every 13 years, the Brood X Cicadas come and take over! When they do, there are thousands of them, all coming out of the ground at the exact same time! Since this group was terrified of bugs, I thought I had better prepare them! I showed them videos and pictures of the cicadas and emphasized that they were very friendly and never ever would bite! They are just very big, friendly, noisy insects! Every day we checked to see if they came and started to worry they wouldn’t come to our school, but they finally did! Boy did they change their minds about insects! They started collecting as many as they could to look closer at them! 

After a couple days, the male cicadas started making the noises they are famous for! The kids were so excited to hear them! Now they were interested in al, bugs! Unfortunately we only had a couple days of school left! They started looking for ants and observing them! Then, they fel in love with honeybees! 

We talked about how important honeybees are. To find out more, we read books and watched videos to learn all we could about them! We learned that they only sting because they are scared or protecting themselves, not because they are mean. All of the sudden, they felt empathy for these little bees! We also learned about all the delicious food we would not have if we didn’t have honeybees! Soon, they were searching for them so they could observe them taking the pollen from flower to flower! They were also protective of them making sure no one even thought of hurting them! 

We did a small honeybee project since we only had a couple days!

We ended by eating a honey filled honeycomb! Almost all of them tried it! 

On our last day of school we had field day! We all had so much fun!

And then we said our goodbyes. This group is very close to my heart! It was emotional for all of us. When you have only 15 kids, you have more time to build relationships with everyone together so we were an extra close-knit group this year! 

And so ends my 28th year of teaching kindergarten! 2020 was not easy and was not much fun as we learned online, but 2021, when were were all exploring together in the classroom, was wonderful and turned into an absolutely amazing year with an amazing bunch of little friends! I will miss them dearly! I’ll end this post with my traditional picture of my easel with a years worth of art on it! Have a wonderful summer everyone!