Teaching Children about Insects with Bright Minds

[Ad- gifted product] The sun is out, the birds are tweeting each day, and everything seems a bit warm and bright during the day. Now that the weather has gotten better, children are out playing outside, in nature. Bright Minds has tons of nature toys to help children better interact and even learn from the world around them – a much needed break from screens and always being in front of video games. Kai, actually, started playing a Roblox game all about becoming an ant and living in an ant colony. As he had this new fascination with ants, we wanted to bring that interest to the real world, so we decided to get Kai a starter ant farm. He’s quite excited about having a “proper” ant farm (IE, one with a queen ant) but those last for 30 years as an active farm, so we figured a starter farm would be better for him. To get ready to get ants, we actually picked up three items from Bright Minds.

Amazing Ants book

Though ants are an insect, bringing them into your home in an ant farm, is the same as getting a new pet. Or, well, getting hundreds of new pets if you collect a bunch of ants! Though Kai had been doing lots of his own research through YouTube videos, we wanted to get him a physical book that could help in his knowledge of getting a new pet. Ants, though they don’t take nearly as much work as a cat or hamster, are still a living creature that he wants to take responsibility for. This book is a pretty straight forward informational book that tells you what ants eat, what their eggs look like, what they do in their day to day life. It’s got big pictures and bold words that are important – to pay attention too. Kai knew many of the aspects of the book already, but it gave him a good reference and way to get started into this. But next, we had to make our farm.

Ant World Farm

Ant World is an easy to build, starter farm for keeping your new ants into. Kai built this farm completely on his own, following the pretty simple instructions. This set came with sand to fill up the farm with (though we used our own funnel) and a booklet of more ant information, which Kai read before getting some ants. This ant farm comes with a few options – there is a long tube that is attached to a small, magnified container – which is great for getting initial ants into. They will then travel through the tube into the base of the farm, making their home in the main body. This tube can then be taken off, and a small cap can be placed on to plug the hole. The top can be opened, to add food and water in. There is a green spacer that Kai put included stickers on to make a bit of an interesting background. On the outside, you can slide on two cardboard walls, which give ants protection from the sun and privacy to create their own tunnels. After about a week, your ants should be tunneling away and use to the world!

GeoSafari Jr Mighty Magnifier

When it came to finding our ants, the booklet that came with our ant farm suggested we harvest our own out in the wild! So, with the GeoSafari Magnifier, we searched for ants. Kai wore these magnifying binoculars, staring down at the ground, to find the best places to hunt for ants. We picked ants up with paper, shook them gently off of leaves, and otherwise got them into the small container so they could go into the farm! this was the most challenging part of this project, as if you get ants from two different colonies, they do fight – which ours did. One team dominated and we ended up having to dump out a bunch of dead ants, left in the magnifying container. It also takes quite some time to harvest ants. Kai was well up for the challenge though, and we supported him, even when he lost an ant or two in our front room! He’s really found a lot of joy in keeping ants and has continued his interest, so we are looking towards getting a queen ant and some colonies. Wish us luck!

If you are looking to encourage learning through bugs in your house hold, considering an ant farm (without a queen) could be a really fun time for your child!

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