4-H Cloverbuds – Bugs Part 2

We had part 2 of our Bug unit with Cloverbuds this week.  Part 1 was our field trip to the Bug Museum and can be seen here.

We started our meeting, as usual, with the Pledge of Allegiance and the 4-H Pledge.  For attendance this week, I had them stand up and tell everyone their favorite part of the Bug Museum trip or (for those who didn’t make the trip or couldn’t remember) their favorite bug.   We then moved right to our main activity which was a Bug Hunt.  Since our meetings take place in one room at the library, I tried to be a little creative when hiding the bugs.  There were stacks of chairs and a few tables set up around the room that offered places to tuck some bugs.  I bought tape and had some crawling up the walls or hanging from door knobs.   The ants and cockroaches really blended in well with the brown carpeting.


There were 13 different bugs – a package of 12 different ones that I bought at Party City and a package of butterflies that I purchased separately.   I made up bingo-type cards with 6 bugs each (can be downloaded from Google Docs here, there are 15 different cards.).  Each of the kids had a card attached to a plastic baggie and were able to search for the bugs on their card.  This ensured there everyone would be able to find the same number of bugs.  With an age range of 4 to 9, I wanted to make sure everyone would have the chance to hunt.   To help the kids match up the plastic bugs I provided a master copy of all the pictures with their descriptions for reference.

The kids were given magnifying glasses (great find at the Dollar Store!) and sent off to hunt.



The kids had a lot of fun with the bug hunt.   For our craft, we had two separate activities.  The kids had a choice of making Thank you cards to send to our tour guide from the Bug Museum or building bug shelters from Legos.

The cards were made using markers, crayons and foam stickers.




Since there are some kids who aren’t into crafts and I wasn’t sure how long the hunt would take, I bought along some random Legos that the kids could then use to build homes for their bugs.  Most of what they built were vehicles.




I also brought along many of our bug books for anyone who wanted to look through them.