Ant Day

In case you didn't know, today was Ant Day! You certainly wouldn't have known because Audrey made it up! Haha! Yesterday afternoon she mentioned something about "tomorrow is going to be Ant Day" but she didn't really say anything more about it. This morning, however, she was 100% in to it!! It turned out to be such a fun day! We all loved it! In fact, it was so fun and creative that it definitely deserves a blog post!

By 6:00 this morning Audrey was already full force making crafts and setting up for the Ant Day festivities. Before we took Mitchell to work and the kids went to school Audrey gave both Mitchell and me a piece of lined paper. She asked us to learn about ants and write everything down on the paper so we could give an oral report of what we learned this evening.

Ant decor

An articulating ant with many legs!

These are homemade paper envelopes to collect live ants from outside. They even sprinkled sugar out on the back porch to attract some. Oh darn, it didn't work. 

This is for the Pin the Thorax on the Ant game!

Audrey gave us a demo of the game this morning

They asked for Ant snacks, so ants on a log for breakfast!

After school they really enjoyed making their own ant snacks. They loved the idea of crafts you can eat and food you can craft! *My kids are crazy about crafts and are constantly creating things! 

A corndog ant. Good one Redick!

Mom's ant snack

One of Reid's ant creations

She loved this activity!

So did Reid!

We had pizza with "ants" (olives look like ants, right? By dinner I was short on more ideas!)

Every Monday night we have Family Home Evening. Normally it is an opportunity to do gospel teaching and learning as a family. We also love to have fun together, play games and often we have a treat! Tonight Audrey took charge and she directed our ant themed Family Home Evening. Mitchell and I gave our oral reports then Audrey read several sections from 2 different books she had checked out from her school library about ants. It was awesome and actually quite educational! We sang the hymn All Creatures of Our God and King, it was perfect. We finished off the great Ant Day by playing pin the thorax on the ant. Great, light fun was had by all!

Ant Facts:

• There are around 22,000 different species of ants!
• The workers live around 1-2 years
• The queen can live up to 30 years!
• The queen is the only fertile female ant in a colony
• The fertile males are called drones
• Ants are the only animal, aside from humans, that farm other animals for food. 
• Some types of ants will conquer another colony and take slaves from the conquered to work for them
• The insect with the deadliest venom is actually a type of ant
• Ants sometimes nurture aphids and actually care for them because the aphids are really good at extracting nectar from plants. The ants love this nectar so they follow the aphids around to steal their nectar. Some mother aphids will actually leave their offspring in the care of the ants and go off to have another set of offspring knowing the first set will be well taken care of.
• Ants are really really cool!