I have been scrambling to catch up on my blog and I am finally getting to this post about Lesson 13 of Apologia's Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, "Interesting Insects." In this lesson, we learned
I have been scrambling to catch up on my blog and I am finally getting to this post about Lesson 13 of Apologia's Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, "Interesting Insects." In this lesson, we learned about praying mantises (AKA: "preying" mantises), dragonflies, grasshoppers, crickets, katydids, aphids, and cicadas. These are the things we did to supplement this lesson.
Last year, we ordered praying mantis egg cases from Amazon to see if we could get them to hatch.
It came with two. (Before this, if I had seen these things outdoors, I would have had no idea what they were!)
We placed them in our outdoor net for incubating on our deck.
Good luck, guys!
It wasn't long before we had nymphs! And lots of them! Our first egg case had hatched!
Seriously, this picture does not even look honest as far as how many nymphs we had! There were HUNDREDS!
We called our homeschooling buddies to meet us at the park to help us release them.
They look like miniature forms of the adults!
The kids had so much fun placing them on the bushes!
They were on everything!
We still had tons when we tired of dispersing them at the park so I then brought the still full net to the preschool at our church for them to have a lesson on the insects. They got their fill, too! Here is one egg case, empty, and still one to go! (The other hatched almost a week later.)
As per the text's suggestion, we used a drinking with water and a spoon to understand how a shorter wing on an insect can make a higher sound then a longer wing. Mags tapped the edge of the glass with a spoon when it was about one third full.
Then, she added more water and tapped again. The sound was lower.
With an almost full glass, the sound was at its lowest. Why and what does this mean for what we're learning? The text says, "The glass makes sound because the glass and the water inside it vibrate. The more water you had in the glass, the longer the column of water was that vibrated in the glass. You found out that the longer the column of water, the lower the pitch of the sound. This means that the shorter the column of water, the higher the pitch of the sound. It is essentially the same with crickets and grasshoppers. The shorter the wings, the shorter the length of the thing that is vibrating, so the higher the pitch of the sound." Interesting!
Finally, I just wanted to share some of Maggie's pictures from her journal. I LOVE kids' pictures.
Aren't they cute?
Watch for the last post for Zoology 1 this week!