The Ants Go Marching ... into Your Lesson Plans!

Why not capitalize on students' fascination with insects? Education World offers a scavenger hunt, with questions for students in all grades. Included: Fun activities to extend ants into your language arts curriculum!

Open your classroom doors to a learning invasion! You'll find ants all over the Internet... and Education World has made teaching about ants as easy as attracting them is! We've created a scavenger hunt with questions about ants for students of all ages. Just sort through the "graded" questions below to create your own custom-made scavenger hunt!

Are Your Students "Itching" to Learn About Ants?

A series of scavenger hunt questions follows. The answers to those questions will reveal many interesting facts about ants ... Like ants, the questions cover a lot of ground. Some questions are more difficult, or require more online reading to answer than others do. 

You might:

• Choose a handful of questions appropriate for your students.
• Create a hunt for your students that combines easy and more challenging questions.
• Let students work in small cooperative groups to answer a handful of the questions.

However you approach it, your students are sure to have fun searching the Web. (The answer key appears below.)

THE ANTS GO MARCHING...HURRAH! HURRAH!
 

Additional Resources

• Ants-On-a-Log Follow this recipe for a tasty snack. (The "ants" in this recipe are really raisins!)
• The Ants and the Grasshopper An Aesop fable that teaches the lesson "It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow."

Answer Key

1. Students will list three of these parts: head, mouth, antennae, thorax, legs, wings, or abdomen.
2. a red wood ant
3. 8,000
4. Worker ants gather most of the food, help raise the young, and defend the colony.
5. Ants use their jaws to fight enemies; to grasp, carry, bite, or cut up food; to carry their young; to dig up soil; or to cut through wood to build a nest.
6. 200,000
7. Human jaws move up and down; ants' jaws move from side to side.
8. 2 feet high
9. 30,000
10. Leaf-cutter ants carry pieces of leaves over their heads as if they're carrying little umbrellas or parasols.
11. Army ants eat mostly insects, but any slow-moving creature can become a victim, eaten alive and left a skeleton in a few hours.
12. Check student drawings.
13. Most army ants are blind. They are guided by blind soldier ants that lay down scent trails.
14. The odorous house ant got its name from the disagreeable smell (similar to the smell of rotten coconuts) given off when a group of them are crushed.
15. Yes, ants come in yellow and purple and green.
16. According to one estimate there are a million ants for each person!
17. A female odorous house ant lays one egg each day.
18. The head of the native fire ant is wider than its abdomen; the head of the imported fire ant isn't wider than its abdomen.
19. The more area the mound of anthill dirt above the ground covers the more solar heat the anthill absorbs and the warmer the nest is.
20. They lay down a chemical trail that the other ants follow.
21. No; leaf-cutter ants chew the leaves into a pulp-like material which will sprout a fungus. The ants eat the fungus.
22. An ant's antennae enable it to find and taste food; detect air currents; feel surface textures; hear; and smell.
23. The special dog bowl has a rim area that circles it. The rim is filled with water so ants can't get to the dog's food!
24. Large yellow ants (also called citronella ants) have a lemony smell when they are crushed.
25. Ants use comb-like structures on their legs to clean their antennae.
26. The longest column of army ants ever seen was a half-mile (.8 kilometer) long!
27. Fire ants from Mexico entered the United States through Mobile, Alabama.
28. The maxillae chew food into small pieces. Ants swallow the liquid that comes from those pieces and spit out what remains of the food.
29. From smallest to largest, the leaf-cutter ants are the worker ant, the soldier ant, then the queen ant.
30. The oldest known ant in the world, found preserved in amber, lived about 100 million years ago.
31. Carpenter ants win the life expectancy race! Carpenter worker ants live up to seven years; fire worker ants live up to 180 days; and odorous house worker ants live for several years.
32. Some ants squirt formic acid from the end of their abdomen into the wound.
33. Carpenter ants don't actually eat the wood they attack. Instead, they rip and tear the wood to create their nests.
34. A queen leaf-cutter ant lays special non-fertilized eggs just for eating.
35. Yes, ants make sounds like those made by crickets and katydids, only not as loud. An ant also makes a sound by rubbing its body against another ant's body.

Article by Gary Hopkins
Education World® Editor-in-Chief
Copyright © 2010, 2015 Education World

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