For three days in one week, my daughter found a centipede in our dining room. On the third day, I said to her, “Wow! That’s centipede #3!”, as I used a piece of paper to release our crawling friend into our backyard.
We had no idea how they have been getting in. It’s early spring in Toronto, not the warmest temperature to have windows opened.
My daughter has always enjoyed being “mommy’s helper”. The next day, while we held the watering jug together, we approached one of our biggest plants and guess what we found!
I am not going to lie. The crawlies were definitely giving me the heebie-jeebies. But I sat with my little fascinated one to observe the centipedes. She said to me, “that’s centipede #4!” (more like centipede #20!” There were easily twenty to thirty of them in all sizes, which tell me that they must have been breeding in the soil of our planter.
We had a spontaneous lesson about centipedes being decomposers, providing nutrients for our plant to grow bigger.
We counted them.
We compared them in size.
I asked her:
“Can you find one bigger than that one?”
“Which one is smaller? This one here or that one over there?”
She asked questions like “What are they doing?” and said “I wonder where they are going.”
I asked her, “remember you found them on the floor near your chair?”
So we talked about how the centipedes might have gotten from the planter to about 2 feet away where we found them. (They crawled up the stem of the plant, onto a branch, and fell off a leaf, which extended further from the planter). She enjoyed the detective work we did!
Remember that making observations is part of learning.
Go outside, have fun, observe nature, find wonder in the usual things - and you might find a spontaneous learning moment waiting for you.
- Mandy
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