Mystery Insect (Jackson)

During recess on Tuesday, Sean saw a big insect and showed it to Jackson who then showed it to me.  We decided to take a picture of the insect to try to identify it, as we had no clue what it was?  The insect, however, kept flying away.  Finally, it landed on Mrs. Disipio who was visiting our class.  She was quite courageous when asked not to move, even when the insect started to move toward her neck.  We got our picture and started our inquiry 2 days later.  Before we showed the picture of Jackson and Sean's insect to the class, we had the children naming insects that they knew.  Two students named a dog and a rat. We also added those name to the list to help the children differentiate between insects and animals.  We started by comparing the rat to our insect.

 

Here is our comparison:

Insect	Rat and dog
small	big
6 legs	4 legs
antennas	ears
wings	tail
	whiskers

We eliminated the rat and dog from our list as we concluded that they were not insects.  We continued the activity by comparing each insect from our list to the mystery insect using an iPad and a computer.  Here are the insect that we eliminated including the reason.

Bumblebee - It is yellow and black (Ella).
Butterfly - Its wings are big and colorful (Sean).
Beetle - We thought it might be a bettle as they had many of the same characteristics. We decided to look at the other insects and come back to this one.
Ant - The antennas are small (Brandon).
Ladybug -  6 coconuts (Aiden),  it has polka dots (Christina),  it is round (Jackson),  it is red (Arman).
Spider - It has 8 eyes and 8 legs (James).
Tarantula - It is not an insect (Tianna).
Grasshopper - It hops (Sean),  2 long legs in the back (Joanna-Lee).
Fly - It has wings (Alessio).  We explained to the children that the mystery insect also had wings but we could not see them.
Mosquito -  It has wings (Alessa).
Dragonfly - It has long legs (Alessa).

We decided to look at other pictures of beetles.  We searched in Google for images of "black beetle with long antennas".  Some of the beetles looked identical to our insect.  Here is one beetle that looked quite like our mystery insect.  You can make your own comparison with our insect.

Mystery Insect

Image of a beetle found on Google.

We voted and 18 of us believe that our mystery insect is a beetle because both insects are black, have long antennas, 6 legs, a small head and an oval body.