Build a Cricket Colony

Here is an examples of an activity you can do at school to help your students feel comfortable with the Scientific Method.

Kids just seem to be drawn to animals. As you know, when you do something the students are naturally interested in, learning is much more fun. Insects seem to fascinate many young people and crickets are a natural. They are readily available from most pet stores. And the best part, they are reasonably priced, you should be able to get enough for you entire class for only a few dollars.

There are may options for housing your crickets. You can put them in an empty aquarium, large jars, or you can even have your students design and build their own cricket cage. Building your own cage is a great way to get students involved in researching what crickets need, and how they live. For older students, you could have the students use their math skills to design a cage and determine how much the materials would cost. For students of all ages, building your own cricket cage is an easy, fun way to work on cooperative team building skills.

Once you have the crickets in their new home, allow your students to just watch them. What are the insects doing? How do they spend their time? When are they most active? Give your students an opportunity to write down their observations and questions.

As a class or in teams, develop a research question. Narrow your focus to one question, be careful to avoid subjective questions or those with more than one variable. There is no way we can tell if an animal "likes" something, we can say that it prefers one item over another when given a choice. You could offer a variety of foods and see which the animal prefers, or place some crickets in a bright area and other in a dimly lit area and see which are more active. Let your students guide the experiment. They will be much more enthusiastic if you are answering a question they want to know about. Remember, crickets are live animals, they need to be treated with care and respect. Sometimes young students can get a little rough when handling animals and need to be reminded to use caution.

After you have created a statement on what you predict the outcome to be (a hypothesis). The next step is to help your students determine how to measure their observations. Depending on the question, measurements may be time spent in one area of the exhibit, how many times the crickets move, chirp, touch another etc... Young children could drop a bean in a jar every time they see the desired behavior, older children could use a timer to measure how often the behavior occurred in a given time period.

After the data has been collected, it needs to be analyzed. Younger students could add up how many times something happened and make picture graphs. Older students could find averages and percentages, as well as, make pie charts, or bar graphs of their findings.

Ask your students what they think the results mean? Is their hypothesis correct? Does the data prove what they thought would happen? If the crickets spent most of their time on one branch in their exhibit, what does that mean? If all of one kind of food was eaten, what does that mean? Not all the students may reach the same conclusions (just like real scientists). Different conclusions does not mean someone is wrong! Maybe additional study is required. Perhaps the first study, generates more questions, and you need to ask another question to clarify your results.

The final step could be to have your students present their findings to others. One team could tell the rest of the class, or your whole class could share their findings with another. The sharing of findings could take many forms. Student could make a drawing, do a brief talk, create a poster or they could write a story about their experiment. Older students like professional scientists, could prepare a poster presentation of their findings. The pros are careful to include the initial question, data collection methods, results (graphs or chart) and a brief written piece on what the data means.

Crickets are just one example of the many classroom animals that you can study, watch your goldfish, observe the hamster you could even watch other students in the school! The possibilities are endless. Go out and EXPLORE!

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