Designing a Minibeast

Following our rather wet nature walk earlier this week, Mr H, Miss E and I are full of a cold. To be fair, Mr H was already a bit snuffly so I think we would have had it anyway – the wet weather has just brought it forward a little.

Today we had no plans so, after a bad night with Mr H, I decided we’d have a quiet day at home. We did a few things and then spent a little while designing a minibeast.

I wanted the children to have a think about some of the characteristics of the minibeasts – they’d already identified some of the common things on those we had seen on Monday so I wanted to build on this. We are submitting this for a CREST Science award so I asked them to think about the following things when designing a minibeast as per their guidelines:

• Where will it live?
• How does it move around?
• What does it eat?
• How will it defend itself from predators?
• What colour is it?
• What’s it called?

The children set about drawing things and Mr D soon settled on a ‘spiky pond bug’. He tells me that this bug lives in ponds – and comes to the surface of the pond to eat flies. He has a spiky body which helps to protect it and it is a mud colour. It has four legs and these all help it to swim and when there is heavy rain the spiky pond bug floats to the top of the pond like a stick.

We had some lovely conversations about the minibeasts they were designing and Mr D was also really motivated to do some writing too – something he has taken an ever increasing interest in recently.

Miss E also set out designing her minibeast. She made a ‘strawberry cherry bug’ which lives underwater in a river, It has ten legs, four of which help it to swim. The spikes on its feet help it stick to twigs that float on the river and it eats flies and tree bark. She hasn’t finished drawing her bug yet!

You could extend this further by getting the children to make their minibeast from clay or even junk model it. It might be something we explore if we continue to have a lot of rainy days this week! This was a fun activity and was good to help the children think about some of the characteristics of the bugs.