EDUC 2220- Educational Technology Lesson Plan

Ants in Our Pants!

Kathryn Shumate
Second Grade/Science

Common Core Standards:

Life Science
Interactions within Habitats
This topic focuses on how ecosystems work by observations of simple interactions between the
biotic/living and abiotic/nonliving parts of an ecosystem. Just as living things impact the environment
in which they live, the environment impacts living things.
1.

Living things cause changes on Earth. (ORC Resources)

Lesson Summary:
In this lesson, we will watch how an ants in an ant farm change the environment that they live in.
Before we build our ant farm we will research how ants change their environment and we will build a
bar graph by collecting data on what our class thinks ants are, pests, pals, both, or I dont know yet
but I want to find out!
Estimated Duration:
This lesson will take about 150 minutes, I will break this up into five twenty five minute sessions and
five minutes every day during the second week.
Commentary:
One thing that I think will be difficult for the students is for them to get excited about learning about
ants. I will get them interested by having technology integrated into the lesson and by bringing in live
ants so that we can observe how they change the sand in the ant farm. I also am going to have a
special movie day on the Friday before I start this unit and we are going to watch Pixars A Bugs
Life.

Instructional Procedures:
Week 1~

Day 1:
The first five to ten minutes will be spent talking about the movie A Bugs Life that we watched on the
Friday before as a special treat. This will lead into our discussion on what they know about ants. The
next fifteen to twenty minutes will be spent learning the parts of ants through the diagram that I
made detailing the parts of worker and queen ants using the characters from A Bugs Life.
http://www.classtools.net/widgets/postIt_5/Fjt1S.htm
http://www.classtools.net/widgets/postIt_8/mT87c.htm
Day 2:
The first fifteen minutes we will spend learning about what a pest is and what a pal is. Then the
students will start to look through books that I have provided and use http://www.wolframalpha.com/
on chrome books to start learning about the habits of ants. When there is five minutes left we will
spend a few minutes talking about what they have learned and take a class poll on whether we think
that ants are pests, pals, both, or I am not sure yet but I want to find out!
Day 3:
For the first five minutes we will review how to build a bar graph. We will talk about how to label them
and what a scale is. For the next twenty minutes the students will be out into groups of three to four
students, then they will make bar graphs on posters from the data that we collected from the
previous day.
Day 4:
For the entire twenty five minutes we will get into the same groups that we were in the previous day
and we will start to build our ant farms.
Day 5:
We will finish up our ant farms and put the ants into them. From then on we will observe how the
ants change the environment they have been put in. The ant farms will be kept on the tables that the
groups work at so they can observe and record the ants.
Week 2~
The students will spend five minutes every day during their morning work and record the changes
that they see with words and pictures in their Ant Diary. At the end of the week we will talk about
what they have learned about how ants change their environment.

Pre-Assessment:
My pre-assessment will be our discussion on what the students already know about ants. I will want
to see if the students know what the ants house is called, the different parts of the ants, and if they
know how to differentiate between worker and queen ants.
Scoring Guidelines:
I will assess how much the students know about ants by if they can identify the parts of the
ant, what the ants house is called and if they know the difference between queen and
worker ants. If there are students with a lot of knowledge about ants already I will make those
students group leaders.
Post-Assessment:

My post assessment will be the Ant Diary that the students are keeping throughout the second
week when they are observing. They will be expected to use both words and pictures to describe
their observations. At the end of the week the students will have to answer questions about how the
ants changed their environment.
Scoring Guidelines:
I will assess how well the students understand by looking at the observations they had made
throughout the week and how they answered the questions about how they have changed the
environment

Differentiated Instructional Support

Describe how instruction can be differentiated (changed or altered) to meet the needs of gifted or
accelerated students: For students who are gifted I will make them the leaders of the groups for
making the bar graphs and the ant farms.
Discuss additional activities you could do to meet the needs of students who might be struggling with
the material: For the students who are struggling I would send home extra worksheets about ants
and I would have websites that they could use to learn at their own pace during down time in the
classroom.

Extension
http://www.ohiorc.org/
This site lists all of the standards that Ohio has and is organized by subject and grade. The students
could benefit from using it because they could see that other students their age are learning the
same concepts that they are.

Homework Options and Home Connections

I do not think that students in elementary school benefit from homework as much as students who
are older do. I would however encourage parents to talk about ants at home and possibly go out and
look for ant hills. If they were able to find an ant hill the parents could have their child tale a picture of
it and then send it to me so that I could upload it too our classroom blog.
Interdisciplinary Connections
I can easily integrate math and writing into this lesson. The students bar graphs ties into the
standards that correlate with Data and Measurement and the students writing in their Ant Diaries
correlates with writing standards.

Materials and Resources:

For teachers

I will need to have a smartboard to have the diagrams of the ants from A Bugs
Life, and places in the classroom to hang up the students bar graphs after they
have completed them.

For students

Students will need chrome books for iPads to research the ants, they will need
poster boards and markers to make their graphs, they will need a small, narrow
jar, a large mason jar with a lid, cheesecloth, moist sand, and a string or rubber
band to make the ant farms, and notebooks to have as their Ant Diaries

Key Vocabulary
Habitat
Antennae
Thorax
Abdomen
Body
Head
Pest