Help your children to prepare boxes for the insects by putting some damp soil or compost in the bottom and adding a stone or two.
Go into your garden and help your children find some insects. They like to hide in cool, damp places. Let the children move stones, look in the compost bin and examine flowers, leaves and the soil. Your children can collect them carefully by using a piece of card to pick them up.
They need to put them in the plastic boxes, but should try not to mix the different sorts, just in case they eat each other! Give your children a magnifying glass to watch what the bugs do. They can put them on a clean piece of paper if they want to look more closely at them. How many legs do they have? What colours are they? Do they have any patterns on them? What do their faces look like? How do they defend themselves?
Now they can either put the bugs back in the garden, or draw one or more of the insects on the paper. Tell them to make their picture nice and big, putting their name and the date on the bottom of it.