Bug Hotel Proposal

Hello I am Aibel. Today I will be telling you (yes you!) about our bug hotel proposal. We want to make a bug hotel (I know right epic idea). Before we can start though we need to ask the Board of Trustees for permission since its quite a big project. Below is the proposal that we sent them to review.

Saving Skinks and Mr Walker's Shed

Some boys from another class found a baby skink before cross country one day.
They gave it to Room 25 to put in our bug habitat. We put it in but then realised it might get eaten! (or eat some of our bugs)
Connor, Cameron and Brooklyn captured the skink and then released it into the lizard garden on the field. They have decided to call themselves the Skink Savers!

On a Friday afternoon we decided to do a school rubbish clean up to work on our positive reputation and make sure we are pulling our weight around the school.
We collected a whole bucket of rubbish in 12 minutes!

On our way back from collecting rubbish, we saw Mr Walker. He took us around the back of his shed - there are so many things there we can use for the bug hotel revamp! We had found pallets,wood and circle pallets. A couple of years ago a class had made a bug habitat on our school field and we have decided to make new one. We are going to make this in term 3.

Air plants have arrived!

Mrs Plowright bought us some beautiful airplants to put in our bug habitat. We were so excited when they arrived. The person Mrs Plowright bought them from said he would like to talk to us about the airplants. How cool is that!

Our bug habitat is now looking pretty flashy with all the new airplants. Students have been bringing bugs in every day. We have lots of snails, slugs, centipedes, earwigs, cockroaches and more! We definitely want to revamp the insect hotel on our school field. All of these bugs will need a permanant home to live in eventually.

Thinking about our reputation

Room 25 wants people to know how our class is awesome but we are still remembering that we want to be recognised in a positive way and for the right reasons.

We have to be careful because in some of our assembly’s when a few of the teachers talk about our bug habitat, some of the classes were staring at us so we need to be careful about our behaviour. Whenever a class comes to look at our habitat, two people from our class will share and help the kids look at our habitat.

Room 14 Comes to Visit

Room 14 is a year 4 class at Elm Park School. They had heard about our bug habitat and wanted to come and visit. We thought this was a great idea - we were going to get to show off our awesome habitat to other kids!

We presented our habitat to Room 14. They thought it was pretty cool and had lots of good questions for us. Once they had looked for some bugs and watched the waterfall in action we listened to some of their haiku poems. They had written their poems about insects. Here are a few of them to look at.

Mrs Plowright comes to visit

Our class room 25 was making our bug habitat, a few minutes later our principal Mrs Plowright came in to visit and see how we were doing. She saw everyone participating at what we were doing, I just kept on doing what I was already doing when she didn’t arrive here. I was measuring and thinking what should go in the inside of our bug habitat, I measured the fish tank first, next I told Nemith. I told Nemith how long, wide and the sides are, then I started to help Nemith and the others about what should go in the inside. Then she left and smiled back at us, we all just continued doing what we were doing before she came over.

When we packed up our teacher told us that Mrs Plowright is going to buy us some air plants - all of us were really excited about this.

Also our teacher told us that Mrs Plowright was really proud of us for what we were doing and how sensible we were doing it and working as a team.

Exciting news! We posted a video of our waterfall in action to the Elm Park School Facebook Page.
Here is the video if you would like to watch it.

Creating the Bug Habitat

Room 25 wrote some letters to Miss Donnell, we asked if we asked if we could use some  resources for our bug habitat. A few days later we received a letter, our teacher read the letter out loud to us, she said “thank you for asking before you took it” and she told us some more about the bug habitat. She said that we could go to the back of the field to get some dirt, soil, leaves and some more bugs because she thought that was the best place to get some resources. We went to the field and got some dirt, soil, leaves and a couple more bugs. When we got back to our class we put everything in and we just kept on doing it.       

We started putting some of the resources into the fish tank to create our habitat. Once we had a few things in there (like dirt and stones) we decided to make some fancy features. 

Nemith’s dad bought a water pump to make a waterfall. Brooklyn got an idea to hot glue a few shells to the water pump so it can be fancy. We also made a bug cave at the same time we made the waterfall. We hot glued popsicle sticks to a muesli box. Then we buried the box under some dirt.                                

Making a Prototype

We decided to follow a design process to create our habitat. First we had to identify the problem: we need to observe bugs up close for our art show accessory. The next steps were to brainstorm and create a prototype bug habitat.

Sofia donated her container. So… resources... we went to look for nice cool resources out on the field and that's when Connor came up with the idea to eat his apple and lend us the core for the prototype so the bugs can eat it. After that brilliant idea of Connor’s we had to get resources. Brooklyn and Dylan took a spade and went to the back of the field in the corner and started collecting dirt meanwhile the rest of the class was bug hunting and looking for resources like short sticks twigs and more twigs the following few weeks we had to plan and put together our prototype. Finally with some tweaking, planning, working and thinking we had our prototype!