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Learners have to colour the insects in the correct colour.

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This video, shows insects that are useful to the South African Garden. It identifies and explains why insects are important to SA gardens.

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Teach all about how insects help us in Grade 3

This is a lovely pack designed to help you plan an exciting and engaging lesson all about how insects help us in Grade 3. It includes South African insect species such as butterflies, lady beetles, damselflies, mantids and bees.

Simple to download and use, this pack includes a range of activities for your learners which will help them build on several important skills as well as learning all about insects and how they can help us in South Africa.

We've also made this resource available to download as a super-eco colour version, which allows you to save ink without compromising the design of the printable elements. It's a great activity pack for any insect themed lesson. Insects are part of the South African CAPS curriculum as part of beginning knowledge lessons for Grade 3 Foundation Phase classes.

What's included in this how insects help us pack?

This Foundation Phase pack includes the following resources which can help you build a lesson on helpful insect life, saving you lots of planning time:

A PowerPoint - This PowerPoint dedicates a slide to several South African insects that are helpful. Each slide features beautiful illustrations of the insect and fun facts about each one. You could see if your class know any other fun facts about each insect as you go through the slides.

An I Spy Activity - This fun I-spy game is ideal to test your young learner's counting skills and insect recognition ability. There is an answer card provided so that learners can write the number of each insect that they can see.

A shadow matching card set - These shadow matching cards can be laminated for you to use several times. Once printed, cut them out. Each one features and insect image and three shadows - can your learners identify the correct shadow for each insect?

A set of colouring sheets - These A4 colouring sheets feature the name of each insect at the top of the sheet. They're ideal for helping your learners with the concentration and fine motor skills. Why not ask each child to do some research on the insect they colour as a homework project, and report back to the class?

If you're feeling brave, you could also take a look at this dangerous insects in South Africa PowerPoint. We also have this South African Insects Display Pack that you might find useful for decorating your classroom during teaching on the theme.

You could also add maths into the theme by downloading our insects maths questions activity booklet.

Facts about how insects help us

Here are some of the fabulous facts that you can learn when you download this resource:

Butterflies help to ensure we get a good crop of food, by pollinating fruit and vegetable flowers which then turn into edible produce.

Bees are also great pollinators, and they also produce honey, which is used for food, medicine and beauty products.

Mantids help to control pests like aphids, grubs and flies which can harm our crops.

Ladybugs love to eat aphids, helping to keep your garden pest free.

The above video may be from a third-party source. We accept no responsibility for any videos from third-party sources. Please let us know if the video is no longer working.

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South African Insects That Are Helpful to Humans Pack

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This is a lovely pack designed to help you plan an exciting and engaging lesson all about how insects help us in Grade 3.

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I originally created this lesson on PowerPoint last year for a WCED visit. I have also used it for English lessons.
This lesson is for Grade 3 Term 2 or 3. I really enjoy designing lessons but obviously time spent on lessons like this is just not practical for busy teachers. Each term I try to do at least 1 or 2 awesome presentations and the rest are pretty mediocre. This is why I am excited to learn about better and quicker ways to plan fun lessons

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Various discussion slides showing how insects can be harmful and beneficial.

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During each section of the lesson, learners will come to the board and drag the correct insect into the circle. Learners must decide which insects belong in the 'beneficial' circle and which belong in the 'harmful' circle.

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After the learners have discussed and gone through the slides about harmful insects, they will watch this video (I did show an edited version).

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After the learners have discussed and gone through the slides about beneficial insects, they will watch this video.

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The Children's Hands-On Museum of Tuscaloosa

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Insects, are a class in the phylum Arthropoda. They are small terrestrial invertebrates which have a hard exoskeleton.

Insects are the largest group of animals on earth by far: about 926,400 different species have been described. They are more than half of all known living species. They may be over 90% of animal species on Earth.

New species of insects are continually being found. Estimates of the total number of species range from 2 million to 30 million.

Some people call all insects "bugs", but this is not correct. Only some insects are true bugs, which is a particular order of insects. People who study insects are called entomologists.

Insect bodies

The body of an insect has three main parts: a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. On the head are an insect's compound eyes, its two antennae (they feel and smell things), and its mouth.

On the thorax, insects have wings and legs. All insects have six legs (three pairs of jointed legs) and usually four wings (two pairs).

Physiology

Just like our muscles connect to our bones to make us walk and stand up, the muscles of an insect connect to the exoskeleton to make it walk and move. Their muscles are on the inside of their skeleton.

Respiratory and circulatory systems

Insect respiration happens without lungs. There is a system of internal tubes and sacs through which gases diffuse or are actively pumped. Air is taken in through openings on the sides of the abdomen called spiracles. Oxygen gets to tissues that need it through their trachea (element 8 in diagram). As larvae, many insects have gills that can extract oxygen dissolved in water, while others need to rise to the water surface to replenish air supplies which may be held or trapped in special structures.

Adult insects use oxygen at a high rate when they fly. They need it for the flight muscles, the most active tissue known in biology. The flight muscles use oxygen at a huge rate: 100 ccs of oxygen for every single cc of tissue per hour. With this system, the greatest diameter a muscle could have (and still consume oxygen at this rate) is about 0.5cm. Even with special extra arrangements, insects cannot get larger than about 11cm long. The largest insect bodies are about as big as a mouse.

Some insects also use a molecule called haemocyanin, which does the same job as haemoglobin does in vertebrates (but less efficiently). The insect circulatory system has no veins or arteries. The 'blood' is called haemolymph, and moves around in the space called the haemocoel. The organs sit in the haemocoel and are bathed in the haemolymph. The 'heart' is little more than a single tube which pulses (squeezes).

How insects grow

Insects start life as an egg. Usually a female (mother) insect lays eggs, but a few species have live birth (the eggs develop inside the mother). The eggs are small; but they can usually be seen with the naked eye.

Other insects have complete metamorphosis, which means that the small larva which comes out of the egg looks very different from the adult insect. Insects that have complete metamorphosis usually come out of the egg as a larva, which usually looks like a worm. The larva eats food and gets bigger until it turns into a pupa. Butterfly pupae ( plural for pupa) are often inside cocoons. Inside the cocoon the insect changes the way it looks and often grows wings. When the cocoon opens, the adult insect comes out. Many insects have complete metamorphosis, for example beetles, butterflies and moths, and flies. The adult stage of development is called the imago.

Evolutionary history

Origin of insects

The oldest known insect fossil is the Devonian Rhyniognatha, from the 396 million year old Rhynie chert. It may have superficially resembled a modern-day silverfish insect. This species already possessed mandibles of a type associated with winged insects, suggesting that wings may already have evolved at this time. Thus, the first insects probably appeared earlier, in the Silurian period.

Origin of wings

In 2008, researchers uncovered what they believe is the world's oldest known full-body impression of a primitive flying insect, a 300 million-year-old specimen from the Carboniferous period.

The origins of insect flight remain obscure, since the earliest winged insects currently known appear to have been capable fliers. Some extinct insects had an additional pair of winglets attaching to the first segment of the thorax, for a total of three pairs. It seems the insects were not a particularly successful group of animals before they evolved wings.

This gigantism may have been due to higher atmospheric oxygen levels, which allowed increased respiratory efficiency. The lack of flying vertebrates could have been another factor. Many of the early groups became extinct during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the largest mass extinction in the history of the Earth, around 252 million years ago.

Kinds of insects

Different kinds of insects can be divided into groups called orders. There are many insect orders. The biggest insect orders are listed below:

Spiders, scorpions, and similar animals are not insects; they are arachnids. Arachnids are arthropods that have four pairs of legs. Centipedes are also arthropods, but not insects: they are in a subphylum called the Myriapoda.

This taxonomy lists some of the better known groups of insects.

Insects and people

Pests can be harmful to people in different ways. Some are parasites, such as lice and bed bugs. Some of these parasite insects can spread diseases, such as mosquitoes spreading malaria.

Other pest insects do not directly hurt people. Termites and some beetles eat wood and sometimes eat buildings, such as houses. However, termites also help break down the trees and branches that fall on the forest floor. Many insects eat agricultural products (plants meant for people to eat). Grasshoppers are one example of pest insects that eat plants in agriculture.

Some insects are useful to us. Bees make honey. The larvae of some moths make silk, which people use to make clothing. In some parts of the world, people actually eat insects. Eating insects for food is called entomophagy.

Many bees and flies pollinate plants. This means the insects help the plants make seeds by moving pollen from one flower to another. Some good insects eat pest insects, such as lady beetles (or ladybirds or ladybugs) eating aphids. Many insects eat dead plants and animals.

Pesticides

Insecticides do not only kill pest insects; sometimes many helpful insects are killed too. When helpful insects are killed, such as those that eat pest insects, the pest insects may come back in larger numbers than before because they are not being eaten by helpful insects anymore.

Images for kids

The tube-like heart (green) of the mosquito Anopheles gambiae extends horizontally across the body, interlinked with the diamond-shaped wing muscles (also green) and surrounded by pericardial cells (red). Blue depicts cell nuclei.

The different forms of the male (top) and female (bottom) tussock moth Orgyia recens is an example of sexual dimorphism in insects.

Most insects have compound eyes and two antennae.

Basic motion of the insect wing in insect with an indirect flight mechanism scheme of dorsoventral cut through a thorax segment with a wings, b joints, c dorsoventral muscles, d longitudinal muscles.

The backswimmer Notonecta glauca underwater, showing its paddle-like hindleg adaptation

Because they help flowering plants to cross-pollinate, some insects are critical to agriculture. This European honey bee is gathering nectar while pollen collects on its body.

A robberfly with its prey, a hoverfly. Insectivorous relationships such as these help control insect populations.

In Spanish: Insecta para niños