We’re currently working through Apologia Exploring Creation with Zoology 1, and today we came to Lesson 2, Activity 2.2: Observe a Cold-Blooded Insect.
The activity has students catch an insect, observe how it moves, place it in the refrigerator for a while, and then observe it again to see how the colder temperature affects its movement.
The only problem for us is that we live in Alaska, and it’s already the end of September.
There aren’t many insects left to catch around here!
So instead of skipping the activity completely, I looked for a video that would let the girls actually see what happens to an insect when it gets very cold.
I found this JoVE experiment using butterflies:
Field-Based Thermal Physiology Assay: Cold Shock Recovery under Ambient Conditions:
Click ⬇️
Watch the JoVE Cold Shock Recovery video
For younger students, you definitely don’t need to watch the whole thing. We watched from about 4:27 to 5:50.
That section shows the butterflies after they have been exposed to cold conditions and follows them as they warm up and recover. It isn’t exactly the same setup as the Apologia experiment, but it gives the kids a chance to actually see the effect of temperature on an insect instead of only reading about it.
And my girls were so focused while watching this part.
It also brought back something they had experienced themselves just a little while ago.
We had caught a dragonfly and were trying to let it go, but it wouldn’t fly away right away. We wondered what was wrong with it, so we looked it up. We learned that when a dragonfly is cold, it may need some time to warm up before it can fly normally.
So we waited.
After a while, it finally flew away.
When we started talking about cold-blooded insects during this lesson, the girls remembered that dragonfly. They were able to connect what they were seeing in the butterfly experiment with something they had already seen outside.
I love when that happens in homeschool science. Sometimes an activity doesn’t work for our season or where we live, but we can still find a way to see what the book is talking about. And sometimes the kids realize they’ve already seen it in real life.
We’ll save the actual Activity 2.2 experiment for a warmer month when we can find some bugs again.
But for anyone else working through Apologia Zoology 1 Lesson 2, especially if you’re doing it during the winter or just don’t have an insect available, I wanted to share this video.
Watch 4:27–5:50 and keep your Zoology book open to Activity 2.2.
It worked really well for us.
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