Minibeast Hunt
This is one of our activities from our Minibeasts Activity box and is a great way to encourage kids to explore and engage with nature. Closely inspecting the mini beasts you find can also be a brilliant way to extend vocabulary.
Set Up
For this outdoors, kids activity I used the bug magnifying pot and the mini beast identification sheet from our Minibeast Activity Box. I also got our Mad about Minibeasts book ready so that we could read about all the other minibeasts that are featured in the book.
The girls were so excited to use their magnifying pots and off we went. To start off with we rapidly dashed from place to place desperately looking for anything that moved! However this rapid dashing led to us only being able to spot a few ants. So then we changed tact, the girls slowed down and we began to look everywhere more closely.
We started to think about where bugs might be hiding. So then we turned over logs and rocks to see what might be underneath. We looked under leaves and took our time to just watch for a while. And it worked. We spotted beetles, butterflies, ladybirds and woodlice. They were so excited to see the insects close up and see their legs, antennae ect. The hardest thing was when we had to return the insects to where we had found them. M wanted to keep them and this became an opportunity to discuss what insects might need to survive. Which in turn led to some research back at home as to what different insects eat.
This is such a great outdoor activity which we have now repeated several times and the girls are now constantly on the look out for insects when ever we are out and about!