24 Hours Later

Happy weekend Friends!

Hope you are enjoying time with your family, I know I am!

Here are some pictures of our ants, 24 hours later!

 It is hard to take a picture with the glare.  They are busy doing what worker ants do best!

 I love watching them.  Jay checks on them about every 5 minutes!  They are cutting away the gel and then carrying the gel in their strong pinchers to the top.

Busy ants extract the gel in order to make tunnels.

Scientists will often study the rocks around ants nests.  These ants tunnel well below the Earth reaching beyond 25 feet.  Their subterranean life often uncovers fossils from long ago.  They simply carry them out of the tunnel and place them around the mound! Follow the story here! 

 No fossils in this container, just mountains of well placed chunks of gel.

Ants live a maximum of 45-60 days.  They live in colonies of 40,000-60,000 ants typically.  Each ant possesses 250,000 brain cells.  A human has about 10 million brain cells.  Collectively, a mound of ants have the brain cell capacity of one human being.  Below you will see an abandoned ant mound that researchers excavated.

I was fascinated as I watched this!  It is exciting watching our harvester ants in the classroom and the children are documenting their observations.  Here are some great pictures of harvester ants I have found online(**NOT ONE OF THEM ARE MINE, NOR AM I TAKING CREDIT!**):

Above:  You can see the compound eye of the ant.  Below:  Here is a picture of the Harvester ant queen.  Ask your child if they know where the heart and stomachs are located.  In the head, mesosoma, or the metasoma?  The 3 jointed, 6 legs are connected to the mesosoma.  The ant tastes, hears, and feels with its antennae. 

 These ants are working to move this piece of dogfood back to the anthill.  Ants are able to lift 20 times their own weight.

This week has been full of activity.  We have been busy setting the expectations for our reading workshop, STAR testing on the computer to find their just right reading level, understanding the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and actively practicing math fact review of additon

You should have received your child's rough draft, noted as RD and circled in purple on their paper, friday afternoon.  All week we had been reading "If you give a ___ a ______" books by Laura Numeroff.  On Thursday we wrote our rough drafts and Friday the final copy in PEN!  They loved doing this and really worked hard!
We cover so much ground in a week, I could never list it all!  I will say your children are super excited to write their own stories and share them with the class.  It is especially enticing now that I have introduced the punch cards!