Homeschool Highlights - Ant Week

I won’t say that this was my favorite topic, but Nicholas seemed to enjoy it. I now know more about ants than I ever wanted to know. My biggest disappoint for this week was that the library did not have most of the books we wanted to use. I ended up just picking out three. Two were fiction and actually both had a math theme. The third was a children’s non-fiction book. We would look at the pictures and I would tell him a couple of facts I thought he could understand. It was funny though because by Thursday we were talking about eggs, larva, and pupa. That really wasn’t something I thought I’d be discussing with my three-year-old.

The books were:

One Hundred Hungry Ants (This was his favorite!)
How Many Ants?
Ants (Animal Lives)



We had two variations of the “ants on a log” snack this week. We used a banana, peanut butter, and raisins the first day.

The second time I used pretzel rods, peanut butter and chocolate covered raisins. Nicholas loved to tell me that he liked eating ants.

Then I made an “ant” snack for him while he was still on his nap. I had the “ants” form the letters A and B. He saw it from the top of the stairs as he was coming down and got really excited.

We worked on our phonics this week. He learned the sounds for A and B. This included having computer time twice this week after his nap. We also worked on our first five sight words. I first quizzed him a couple of times with note cards. Then we took a couple of books and I would pause when one of his words would come up. He was ecstatic when he saw “a”, “and”, “away”, “big”, and “blue”.

He’s also starting to learn how to write his letters. I had him use play-doh to form the letters first. Then we practiced with a dry erase marker. I wish I could say that our first time writing letters went well, but one of us wasn’t interested in following directions and the other one wasn’t doing a good job of exercising patience. But, we both learned a lesson and asked for each other’s forgiveness. Next time we’ll both be doing things differently. My goal for him is not perfect handwriting anyway, but to just get him ready to write.

We also took a walk this week to try and find some ants. I knew it would happen this way, but we only found one. Never fear though. Three of them made their way onto my kitchen floor one day this week when we had the windows open. Then I demonstrated to Nicholas how the ants let out a smell to warn their friends of danger when they are crushed.

He found our lone ant under this rock.

We also sang, “The Ants Go Marching” song several days this week. As we sang, I had him practice holding up the correct number of fingers as the ants went “two by two”, “three by three”, etc.

Finally, we made an ant out of an egg carton and pipe cleaners.

I’m excited about our next week. It includes our first field trip. If this one goes well, he’ll be able to attend more in the future. I’ll leave you with a little conversation we had this morning about ants.