21 replies to this topic

[Lillyrose]

It's been a very busy week for my girls.

One of the tanks came to school. My class, kindergarteners, read a book called Hey There Little Ant. In the story a little boy is going to squish an ant and the Ant is trying to persuade him not to do it. The little boy says that the ant is so small that he wouldn't feel it and the Ants don't have families and all these other reasons why it's okay, while the ant argues and tells him that he does have a family and he does have feelings. Throughout the story it goes back and forth between the child and the aunt and at the end the book never tells you whether or not the child decided to squish the end. Instead it asks what would you do.

Well preparing for an opinion writing I've discovered that many of the children had no issues squishing the ant. Despite the explaining that he had a family they just didn't quite believe that ants could really have a family. They pointed out that the story was fiction and that part was probably fiction as well. So I made the choice to bring a colony to school for a few days.

I feel really bad because the ants of course hate to travel. The vibrations of the car alone are enough to send them all into a tailspin. Not to mention that this was a few days without their heat cable and with the noise of 20 5 and 6-year-old children.

I think it was worth it though because the children really enjoyed watching the ants. They were marveled to see how many ants had come from a single queen in just one year. They thought it was amazing the way that all the baby ants were being kept by older ants and fed and protected just like they are fed and protected by their mothers. They also thought it was crazy the way that the ants took care of each other, much like they take care of their siblings. And finally they acknowledged that ants had feelings when they would see them run away and get kind of scared from the noises or any changes in light when they were watching the ants. They were especially excited to try to spot the queen, who is always covered by a large amount of worker ants.

Friday they did their opinion writing and to my pleasure, every single kid wrote about the reasons why they would not squish an ant. They wrote about how they would tell their friends that it wasn't nice to do, they wrote about how the ants had feelings, they wrote about how the ants had families with babies and mommies. And they wrote about how fun they were to watch. All in all it was a nice change from their opinions in the beginning. Who knows maybe I've created a few ant Keepers in the future

[GOCAMPONOTUS]

Lol tell them to come to the forum!