Bees make honey and live in hives. These are sections of honeycomb from a bee hive, where the bee lives. Ask the children to describe what the honeycomb looks like.
In this lesson, the children will be looking at the homes of various types of insects and learning the term 'habitat'. As you progress through the slides, decide whether you think the minibeast shown is an insect or not. Remember, all insects are invertebrates, but insects are those which have 6 legs!
Key Questions:
How many legs does an insect or invertebrate have?
Do all the minibeasts we look at have legs?
Bees live in a...(hive).
Honey is made by...(bees).
Lesson Expert: Veterinary surgeon Chris Tomlinson keeps bees to make honey at Manor Farm.
Minibeast Trail
Discuss where you would find insects or invertebrates living. Can the children pick out typical minibeast habitats? Their ideas might include woodlands, fields, ponds and gardens. Choose an area in your garden, a local woodland or the school field to find insects or invertebrates in a local habitat. For example, you could overturn a log and see what is living underneath!
When doing so, see if you can identify and name the minibeasts you find - write down the names of these and see if you can group them. Are there different types of spiders, worms and beetles? Does your minibeast have a hard or soft back? Does it have 6 legs (insect) or not? What groups can they be classified into?
When back in the class, the children should discuss what they found and see if they can draw/spell some of the names of the minibeasts. If the children do drawings or paintings, they could be displayed on the wall.
With their talk partners, ask the children to go through the quiz at the end of the presentation and answer the questions. Ask them to share what they have discovered. Were there any insects or invertebrates that they weren't expecting?
Teacher Mastery: Insects are members of a larger group called arthropods. This group also includes spiders, ticks, centipedes, lobsters and crabs. Like all arthropods, insects have a body that is divided into segments, or sections. They also lack a skeleton inside the body.
Invertebrates have no backbone or spine. Despite this, not all are easily squashed like an earthworm - this is because many have a skeleton on the outside of their body, called an exoskeleton. Invertebrates can be traced back to around a billion years ago and account for around 97% of all species known on Earth.
Technically, any minibeast with 6 legs is an insect. Part of the definition of an insect requires the creature to have six legs, as any more or fewer would make it a different creature. For example, invertebrates with 8 legs are arachnids rather than insects (e.g. spiders).