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Pre-k, Kindergarten Grades  Project 2 weeks

BugBnB Garden Getaway

Kayle R
Updated
K-ESS3-1
K-2-ETS1-1
K-ESS2-2
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.K.5
K-LS1-1
+ 5 more
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Purpose

Children investigate what garden bugs need to live by observing bugs, exploring natural materials, and building a bug hotel in the garden. Through picture cards, simple vocabulary, and hands-on choices, they learn how animals and places fit together and how people can change an environment to meet living things’ needs. The work gives them practice sharing ideas, making group decisions, and revising their design with feedback from classmates and garden helpers. The goal is for children to create a real habitat they can proudly show to others while explaining how it helps bugs live, hide, and stay safe.

Learning goals

Children learn to observe garden bugs with pictures and simple words to describe where they live, move, hide, and what they need to survive. They learn to identify and choose natural materials like leaves, sticks, bark, pinecones, and grass that can make a safe bug home, and to build a simple model that shows how animals need places that meet their needs. Children practice asking questions, making observations, and using picture cards, drawings, and speech to explain whether the bug hotel helps bugs and the garden. They also learn to work together, listen to others, and revise the bug hotel using feedback from classmates and garden helpers.

Standards
  • [Next Generation Science Standards] K-ESS3-1 - Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants or animals (including humans) and the places they live.
  • [Next Generation Science Standards] K-2-ETS1-1 - Ask questions, make observations, and gather information about a situation people want to change to define a simple problem that can be solved through the development of a new or improved object or tool.
  • [Next Generation Science Standards] K-ESS2-2 - Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs.
  • [Common Core] CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.K.5 - Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions as desired to provide additional detail.
  • [Next Generation Science Standards] K-LS1-1 - Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals (including humans) need to survive.
Competencies
  • Effective Communication - Students practice listening to understand, communicating with empathy, and share their learning through exhibiting, presenting and reflecting on their work.
  • Collaboration - Students co-design projects with peers, exercise shared-decision making, strengthen relational agency, resolve conflict, and assume leadership roles.
  • Critical Thinking & Problem Solving - Students consider a variety of innovative approaches to address and understand complex questions that are authentic and important to their communities.
  • Content Expertise - Students develop key competencies, skills, and dispositions with ample opportunities to apply knowledge and engage in work that matters to them.
  • Self Directed Learning - Students use teacher and peer feedback and self-reflection to monitor and direct their own learning while building self knowledge both in and out of the classroom.

Products

Children will create a finished bug hotel from leaves, sticks, bark, pinecones, and grass, placed in the garden as the final build. Along the way, they will make labeled picture cards and simple visual displays that show where bugs live, hide, and move, plus a happy-or-sad bug check station to show if the habitat meets bugs’ needs. The final exhibition product will be a garden habitat display that includes the bug hotel, children’s visuals, and photos of the building process for classmates and garden helpers to view.

Launch

Begin with a Happy Habitat Hunt: take children on a short garden walk with the outside garden helpers to look for where bugs hide, move, and live, using picture cards and simple words like leaf, stick, under, and inside. Back in a circle, read a short bug story, let children touch and sort real materials such as bark, pinecones, grass, and leaves, and ask them to choose which items a bug might need for a safe home. End with a quick partner share using happy and sad bug pictures so children decide whether a bug would like each space they saw, then introduce the class challenge to build a bug hotel that helps bugs stay in the garden.

Exhibition

Host a Living Things Showcase in the garden where children present the finished bug hotel to classmates, families, and community garden helpers. In a Happy Bug Celebration Circle, each child points to labeled picture cards or garden photos and shares one way the hotel helps bugs live, hide, or move, then matches a happy or sad bug picture to show if the habitat meets bugs’ needs. Set up a simple bug check station beside the hotel with natural materials and visuals so children can explain why they chose leaves, sticks, bark, pinecones, or grass. Invite the community garden staff member to respond to children’s ideas and celebrate how the class changed the garden to make a safe place for living things.