Bug Detectives
Learning to Play, Playing to Learn
How it works.
Well, we accompany your children down to your local waterway. Once there, an aquatic ecologist will show the children how to collect aquatic macroinvertebrates (water bugs). Meanwhile our teacher will explain to the children what the aquatic ecologist is doing. She will use the inquiry method to allow the children to think about what the ecologist is doing and why. Then the children get to catch their bugs out of a main tray and put them in a bowl. They will take their identification sheet, pictured above, and identify which bugs they see. The aquatic ecologist will be on hand to assist them with any tricky bugs.
Once the children have identified all the bugs in their bowl we will come together to discuss their findings and discover whether their waterway is polluted or healthy.