This is the time of year when walks outdoors are wreathed with cricket chirps, surging cicada hums, and the buzzy sounds of various grasshoppers.
Even a brief excursion outside of the classroom can fill children’s memories with sights of bumblebees clinging to asters, ants carrying small seeds along a pathway, or white butterflies lurching across the fading gardens. Equally unforgettable will be those insects sounds – despite the fact that the six-legged singers were hidden away under stones or leaves or perched high overhead in the tallest maples.
Following such a stroll, your students might try the activity page shown above. It should help them to better link the insect sounds that they’ve just heard to the songsters’ common English names and the creatures’ visual appearance.
You can facilitate this process by playing audio selections from Lang Elliot and Will Hershberger’s magnificent CD and illustrated book combination: The Songs of Insects (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007). Encourage the youngsters to write the correct insect names under the black and white line drawings of the creatures’ forms. If time permits, they can transform the images with colored pencil, crayon, or watercolors. Some might prefer to make their own free-hand drawings of their favorites. They can also pass around the book just mentioned to learn more about these remarkable beings and to better observe the large, ‘shadowed,’ color photographs of these varied and often beautiful insects.
By the end of their art and science time, the children will have added to their store of positive memories of the calls and appearance of autumn insects They’ll also have a paper memento of their adventures to take home for sharing with their families. Perhaps they could even store their work in a seasonal portfolio or journal for future review…
Here are several examples of student work on this project.
