Live Bugs!
Boost basic science and math skills—order our inexpensive live insect kits and use our free online handouts & activities to create a mini-unit! Amazing live insects and other “bugs” are nature’s way of making science fun. Textbooks alone can’t compare with hands-on interactions with live insects and other amazing creatures. Observing, counting, measuring, questioning, analyzing, describing and reporting widen students’ minds and nurture appreciation and affection for small wonders of the natural world. Bonus! Purchases from our catalogs and online store support rainforest education and conservation.
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Live Ladybugs
Ladybugs are the polka-dot charmers of the insect world. Our little orange-and-black beauties provide abundant opportunities to observe, count, describe and graph. They come in packs of hundreds, so you’ll get some for each student. Put them in zipper sandwich bags for easy observing. Can you see the head and legs? How many spots? When you release them outdoors, you know you’re giving a really good gift to the Earth: a female ladybug may eat 5,000 aphids in her short life!
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Live Luna Moths
The gorgeous luna moth arrives in its leaf-wrapped cocoon and emerges a few days later. Big, green, beautiful, with large white antennae—just different enough from a painted lady butterfly to make a fun and educational comparison. Luna’s don’t eat in the adult stage of their life cycle (they have no digestive tracts!), so caring for them is easy.
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Sunflowers, Sprouts and Gardens
Wow! Sunflowers grow as much as twelve feet in a summer and make huge flowers with more than a hundred seeds. And if you’re a student, you can win a prize by growing one! Sunflower seed packets come in sets of 25, enough for a whole class. Use them at school for sprouting and gardening activities or send them home as an end-of-year gift. Each packet includes information for claiming the prize. Everyone wins!
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Live Hornworms
Live caterpillars arrive looking like tiny green birthday candles. They soon grow up to be green giants, and they make a cool red-brown cocoon. Hornworms grow really fast, and the exciting hornworm activity is all about measuring change over time, the number one, rock-bottom basic science and applied math skill. Because it takes many months for hornworms to complete their metamorphosis, you probably won’t see the adult tobacco moth. But you’ll have an amazing time with these fast-growing, easy to handle, gentle, fascinating caterpillars.
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Live Praying Mantises
Talk about baby boomers—your praying mantis egg cases may hatch 50-150 nymphs each! Nymphs eat each other until they’re large enough to capture fruit flies, an observation activity your students won’t want to miss. Mantises are truly the heroes of the garden, devourers of the worst insect pests, and sometimes unwary mice and frogs, too!
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Live Ants
These super-strong, super-busy insects build amazing underground nests, and our see-through habitat lets you watch them work. Students observe, draw, color, count, map tunnels and write. Ant vocabulary makes a fun lesson, too, with words on the “Ant Anatomy” poster. Practice mapping with our free handout—and start building higher math skills now! Oh, and did you know? There are more than 1.5 million ants for every single person living on Earth!
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Live Oozing Slime
What child could resist investigating a creature once mistaken for alien space invaders and officially called “many-headed slime.” Gross! Growing slime and experimenting with it adds fascination to practicing basic science process skills. Our kit for grades 3-5 includes everything you need for a slimy science investigation, including petri dishes and pipettes.
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Live Beetle Races
Science really gets off to the races with gentle darkling beetles. Students write procedures for races; collect, record and tabulate data; and calculate rates, ranges and means. We’ve noticed that even squeamish kids can’t help bonding with their beetle champions. Let the beatlemania begin! Challenging math—best for grades 5-7.
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Live Bessbugs
Called “patent-leather beetles” after their glossy black exoskeletons, these big beetles are fun to handle. But be careful! Their jaws are strong and, although they don’t bite, they can pinch a bit. They also squeak! Our free activities include instructions for a Penny Pull, which measures how many pennies the mighty bessbug can haul.
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