Creepy-Crawly Creations

Observing and describing activity - nature-based

Here's an activity for children at home or at school, involving fresh air and sunshine, exercise and observation, and a picture poem to write and colour.

Hunt for minibeasts

Take children out into garden, park, school grounds, woods, or other natural space, and hunt for creepy-crawlies.

These might be flying ones, such as:

wasps, bees, hornets, flies, horseflies, butterflies, crane flies, dragonflies, midges or gnats;

or crawly ones, such as:

spiders, beetles, ladybirds, crickets, grasshoppers, centipedes, millipedes, worms, snails, slugs or caterpillars. 

Watch and describe

Together, watch their movements, study their shapes and colours, consider what their purposes and destinations might be, and how you feel about them. What characters they might have if they were human?

Describing words

Help think up words to describe them. Here are some possibilities to prompt for:

fragile, frail, delicate, dainty, bright, colourful, spiky, shiny, creepy, crawly, fast, slow, graceful, elegant, cumbersome, ugly, gentle, menacing, dangerous, harmless, tiny, minute, camouflaged, dazzling. 

Moving words

Let's find some moving words for the little creature too. Here are some suggestions:

dashing, darting, flitting, flapping, fluttering, gliding, sailing, drifting, spinning, whirling, creeping, sneaking, lurking, hunting, waiting, pouncing, sliding, slithering, hovering, floating. 

As you can see, the list of possibilities is endless.

Now drop the activity and leave children to explore and discover.

Poetry opportunity

Later, indoors, put out paper, pens and coloured pencils, and perhaps a giant picture of the creature you saw (sketched by you?) to write on and colour (round the words). 

Writing tip

Prompt for some enrichment of their words. If the creature was delicate, was it 'delicate as a petal' or 'petal-delicate'? (Or 'snowflake-delicate'?) If it was gliding, how was it gliding? Gracefully? Dreamily? And where? Through the sky? The what sky? Clear? Fresh? Misty? 

Could you push further? Could you prompt for a simile? Was the ladybird just shiny, or 'shiny as a tiny, bright bead' perhaps? Did the dragonfly just dart, or did it dart 'like a gleaming arrow' or 'like a bonfire spark'? (They will have different simile ideas, of course. These are just examples again.)

Here is a picture poem frame designed for young children, as an example. More later. For a list to order from, see Poetry Frames page.

Kate