Love L – lice, lego and ladybirds

So after seeing Choice chambers on Science Sparks (here) I was really keen to do them with my son – so decided that L could be for Lice. It actually turns out that if you Google lice (as I did to be sure of how many legs to give them) that it turns out lice as in headlice and that they are insects – where as Woodlice are crustaceans . It did lead to an interesting conversation which lead me to discover that my preschool 4 year old knows that spiders have 8 legs, and are not insects who have 6 legs! (I was suitably impressed).

We didn’t have the right materials at all but I thought it was still worth a try.

First we coloured in some card black.

We used an old scone tray and split it into 4 – 2 dark and 2 light, then we put in a bit of tissue paper and added a drop of water (using a milk bottle lid) – one in white and one in black. Meaning that the choices were dark and wet, dark and dry, light and wet, and light and dry.

We then discussed where we thought the woodlice would be most likely to go

– He said the dry and light section.

We went out into the garden and talked about where we might find the woodlice.

I showed him the dark damp parts of the garden and we collected some out of our compost bin.

We collected them in a dark, wet container.

Note he still thought that they’d prefer the light and dry section.

I noticed a flaw in my plan that they couldn’t climb over the ledge (or not likely to) but there was dark and dry Vs light and wet; then dark and wet Vs dry and light. Very discouragingly the first place they went was indeed the dry and light – eek!!

But they soon got moving and both sides preferred the dark sides.

After moving all the woodlice across we made the dark side darker, and did light and dry Vs dark and wet – and indeed they all went to the dark and wet. So now my son will tell you that woodlice prefer the shade and the rain :O)

We made sure the woodlice weren’t away from their habitat for too long and returned them where we found them.

We had great fun mixing together different colour paint in order to get brown to make our woodlice.

My 8 year old has been trying to teach his younger brother that his left hand is the one you can make an L shape with. Unfortunately he was unable to paint this with his broken arm so here you can see my hand. We then glued on antennae, legs and eyes to make a woodlouse.

Now my son thought that LOVE was a much nicer L word

Of course we talk about L things whilst we are out and about

Loaves

Lolly

Not forgetting LEGO

and

Ladybirds

We started simply by drawing black on red paper.

There are many ladybird ideas I want to try and adapt but this is the main one that inspired me.

We painted the black paper (as before) and drew around different sized coins for circles and cut them out.

Then out of red paper we cut out a body and some wings (I later realised that actually the body would have been better off black or even white).

We glued the black spots onto the wings.

And then stuck the wings to the body.

We also did the ladybirds using plates. We cut a plate in half and used that as a template to draw around for the wings.

This time we added some googly eyes.

There’s so much more to do. Like painting ladybirds on toilet rolls, and bee plates. Another idea I like is using hand and foot prints as the main body.