A is for Ants

• Read “Thinking About Ants” by Barbara Brenner

• Preschool Journal A page … more on this soon.
  1. Practice writing letter A and “Ants”
  2. Draw a picture of ants
  3. Put ant stickers all over!

• Playdoh Ants
  1. Set out black playdoh, toothpicks, small black pipe cleaners & googly eyes.
  2. Have the kids roll three balls of playdoh
  3. Poke three balls onto a toothpick
  4. Add toothpick legs (6 of them!), googly eyes and pipe cleaner antennae (we didn’t have pipe cleaner, so we used toothpicks).

• Ant Math … may work better for older preschoolers.
  1. Print the Ant Math page above and slip into a page protector.
  2. Roll a dice and place that many plastic ants on the head.
  3. Roll again and place that many plastic ants on the thorax. 
  4. Add those two together and write the number on the abdomen.
  5. Erase and start again.
  6. NOTE: this was a little much for my kids. They did it twice, then thought it would be more fun to hide their ant picture and dice and find them. So we did that over and over instead. Oh well!
  7. Other Activities:
     • Draw dots all over the ant page and have the kids place one plastic ant on each dot.
     • Write the ABCs or 123s on the ant, call out a number or letter and have the kids cover it up with a plastic ant.

• Find ants with magnifying glass
  1. Give the kids a magnifying glass and go on an ant hunt.
  2. It’s amazing how many little creatures you discover when you look closely.
  3. My 4-year-old actually found a little ant hill in our garden! We watched tons of little ants carrying eggs and little bits of food. Pretty fascinating!

• Make an ant restaurant … this is a favorite activity for my kids.
  1. Write “ANT Restaurant” on a paper plate.
  2. Place a small sample of several kinds of food on the plate.
     • My kids chose crackers, honey, a blueberry, a piece of peach, chocolate chips, a crouton and chocolate syrup. Yum. 
  3. Place in a shady location and wait!
  4. Come back and see how many ants have visited your restaurant!
  5. *The ants loved the chocolate syrup