WF, 3/14/2023 | Wee Friends Early Childhood Program LLC

Happy 5th Birthday Maggie!

Today, we worked on an ant tunnel and mound building project. Last week, when we used the sand dough, a few friends were interested in the ant that was one of the animals out on the table. Someone buried the ant in the dough and it spurred a conversation about how ants build enormous complex systems of tunnels and rooms where they live under the ground. Today we made that idea come to life building tunnels and rooms in our sand for our any colony. We read books about ants at the table while we worked. We learned that different ants in the colony have different jobs. Some are guards, others gather food and others care for the young ants. We also talked about how ants look like worms when they are born and go through a pupa stage just like butterflies. As we worked the project began to evolve. One friend was very interested in the fact that some ants can lift 20 times their own body weight and made his ant carry large balls of sand. Several of us expressed a need for ant eggs in our ant nests so we found some glass beads to serve that purpose. Another friend wanted to build an extra long tunnel and his finger was not long enough so we solved the problem finding a stick to use as a tunnel building tool. One friend added spiders to his ant nest and we got to learn that wolf spiders carry their babies on their backs. After talking about the elaborate systems of tunnels and rooms plus the fact that there is a queen ant, two friends decided that ants live in castles and decided to build a castle for their colony!

Since our friends were working with ant mounds, we also brought out an ant game to incorporate math into this theme. Our friends had a mat with picnic food on it. It was numbered 1 through 10. They were to place the same amount of ants on each number.