A Bug Hunt

This morning I took the kids to the park on a bug hunt.

I was browsing on Pinterest last night (somehow I find time to do that almost every evening..) and saw these great ideas about outdoor activities to do with your kids.
I don't think a bug hunt was one of them, but I used the outdoor exploration/nature walk idea and tailored it to Ethan's current interest in bugs, and viola! A bug hunt was in the making.

We drove to a nearby park (you could do this in your own backyard of course, but we just wanted to get out of the house) and started poking around near the trunks of the huge old Acorn trees.
Guess what we found?
Bugs!!



We found Ants, a Potato Bug (or Pill Bug, if you really want to get technical). I was about to take a picture of the potato bug when it rolled off of Ethan's hand and we couldn't find it. Boo. I did take a picture of the ants, but you can't see them because they're just too tiny and my camera isn't very good at getting close-up pictures.

 We found several Cicada skins;

 and some Dragonflies and Moths.
(The Dragonflies were too fast for me to get a picture!)

There is a small, kind of gray-ish blue moth towards the bottom left side of the picture. I thought it was pretty! 

We also found some mud puddles.

Of course, mud puddles are for jumping in and running through.

What fun!

And, underneath a really big tree, we stumbled upon these:

I'm not sure what kind of holes they are.
Whoever made them wasn't at home, thankfully. :)
I think they might be from the cicadas coming out of the ground??
I'm not sure. Bugs and trees here in the South are quite different, and I am not very familiar with them.

The kids sure loved sticking rocks and acorn tops down the holes, regardless of who or what made them.

We also drew pictures of bugs and traffic signs in the dirt; we talked about how bugs (insects) have 6 legs and spiders (arachnids) have 8 legs and that makes them special. We also talked about how different bugs have different bodies- some have two part bodies, some have one.
I definitely am enjoying teaching science to the kids in this way. It is so much cooler than just sitting in a classroom, talking about bugs.
When we got back home, after we cleaned up and changed out of our muddy clothes, we drew and painted pictures of the bugs. (And container ships and traffic signs. Ethan is obsessed with traffic signs.)

What fun outside things have you done/ are you planning to do this fall?
We are going to take at least one camping trip, and Ethan and Tim are going fishing for the first time ever tomorrow. They are so excited!