Ladybug Inquiry

Two weeks prior to beginning this lesson, we began reading various books about ladybugs. We interactively wrote facts that we thought were important to highlight. Not only did we learn facts from books, we searched the internet together as a whole group. The students were able to view tuns of ladybug photos. Once we gathered and wrote many facts, we created a KWL chart which helped guide our actual lesson.

Students each had a live ladybug in a plastic bag. They observed the ladybug with a ladybug shaped magnifying glass. They counted the spots that they saw and drew the same number of spots on their ladybug shaped paper in a symmetrical way.

Students then followed a list of questions to answer in regards to their observations. The questions asked what they saw when they looked at a ladybug up close. Such as, do you see a nose, do you see wings, do you see hands, etc.

To integrate technology, students went on a cyberhunt in search of additional ladybug facts to help them answer a webquest/cyberhunt worksheet that I created.
Some questions that were asked included; Where do ladybugs live, what do they eat, what are two other names for ladybugs, etc.

Once the lesson was complete, students released their ladybugs in our kindergarten garden and then we came back inside to share everything we learned about ladybugs and completed our KWL chart. Finally, we uploaded our video onto our class website and watched it together. My kids love when I upload videos to our site because they feel like movie stars for one, and they also make observations on how they were behaving as a learner. The parents adore these videos and I see that it really helps unify our classroom community.

Some stellar ladybug websites are:

http://kidscount1234.com/ladybug.pdf

http://www.kidzcraftz.ca/ladybugs.htm

http://www.bugs.ecsd.net/ladybug_facts.htm

https://college.livetext.com/doc/1057617?print=1 (the cyber hunt we went on)