Mini-Beasts Camp Day 3

Mini-Beasts Campers' Family and Friends-

Day 3 was filled with another day of fun as we finished our Mini-Beasts camp!

• We finished up our "Twist an Insect" crafts that create crazy mixed up parts of a stag beetle, bee, house fly and cricket.



• We took a metamorphosis hike, looking for insects in different stages of their lifecycle (we saw the ladybug larva, pupa and adult again)



• Our hike led into our dip-netting activity. We were at the north end of the marsh looking for macroinvertebrate mini-beasts-most of which are immature stages of insects. During this exploration, we found sticklebacks (a marsh fish), newly hatched tadpoles, lots of snails, and the following insects-a caddisfly larva, a red threadworm, a leech, water boatmen and backswimmers.



• On our walk back for lunch, we stumbled upon a basketball-sized snapping turtle walking along a grassy trail. That was a real treat!



• And to top that off, we saw a mother deer and her fawn walk across the trail just a few minutes later!



• After all that excitement, we watched a bit of a cool movie called Metapmorphoses during lunch while resting up for the rest of the day. We watched a caterpillar hatch, a long train of caterpillars travel across the land and a ladybug/ant showdown.



• We read a few bug poems and then headed outside for a game called Clothespins and another called Everyone's It with our new energy from lunch.



• A climbing spider craft was next up, then a short spiderweb hike at the marsh.



• Our spider snack was a lot of fun to make, using cream cheese/peanut butter, some pretzel sticks, sunflower seeds and Ritz crackers; we even got our pictures taken by a photographer for the Buffalo News for next year's summer camp special.

I really had a super time working with each of these campers and hope that they had a great experience. 3 days isn't nearly enough time to explore Mini-Beasts properly, but hopefully it made them more curious about the mini-beasts around them and the wonderful natural world we live in! Photos of our adventures will be posted over the weekend too!

Continue to foster that curiosity in your children and don't be a stranger to Tifft!

Have a great summer!

Miss Caryn