Science – saving the insects

In the news recently, there has been a lot of worry about how quickly insects are dying out and how devastating this could be for our environment.

I set the students in grade 5 a challenge to try to find a small way to save the world. They undertook research to find out why the collapsing insect population matters, how humans are causing this problem and what we can do to help. They used their maths skills to measure the area of a space, which they dug up to see how many of what kind of insects lived there. They categorised the creatures and used their data to decide what habitats are best for insects.

Then, further research helped us to identify which insects were really useful for us.

Students decided that bees were a useful insect to save. They decided they could do this by planting flowers and making bee hotels with bamboo, so that’s what we did.

Leave a comment