Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

15 minutes

Tune In: Introducing invertebrates

15 minutes

Find Out: Meet our mates

25 minutes

Take Action: Bug Hunt

5 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions

Students will:

explore Australia’s invertebrates and their place in our ecosystems
participate in Australia’s Bug Hunt.

Success criteria

Students can:

explain how invertebrates meet the criteria for living
demonstrate the role invertebrates play in our ecosystems.

Preparation

Access the Bug Hunt Australia project in iNaturalist. Set up an account for your class to use and familiarise yourself with the project. Read the Teacher Content Information and decide how you will submit your Bug Hunt Australia finds to the iNaturalist project. You will need to choose an outdoor area where students can conduct their bug hunt. To prevent doubling up of observations, we recommend that you use cones or flagging tape to mark out areas for each group of students. Make sure devices are charged and ready to go!

Tune In: Introducing invertebrates

Step 1

Start by asking students to tell you what bugs they know about. Write down the student suggestions on the board. If they suggest an animal that is not an invertebrate, write it off to the side. If you’re not sure if it is an invertebrate or not, also write it off to the side. You will use this as a list to check later.

Numeracy extension: Students may use different terms for the same animals. Terrestrial isopods, for example, go by woodlice, slaters, rolly-pollys, pill bugs, butchy boys, and many more! Students could conduct a survey to find out which common names are most preferred in their class, school, or community.

Step 2

Once students start to run out of ideas, ask them if they know a scientific name for this group of animals that we commonly call bugs. If students suggest insects, ask them to think about animals such as spiders, snails, or millipedes. All insects have six legs, and these animals do not. They aren’t insects, but they are invertebrates. The one thing all invertebrates have in common is that they don’t have a backbone (or spine).

If you have any animals on your ‘check later’ list, run through them with the class. Ask students to give a thumbs up if they think the animal is an invertebrate or a thumbs down if they think it has a backbone and is not an invertebrate. For any you are not sure about, run a quick online search to check. Once you have confirmed, either add them to your bug list or erase them from the board.

Learning support: On the whiteboard, write the terminology that will be referenced throughout the lesson:

insects
bugs
invertebrates.

Step 3

Start a discussion with your students using these questions:

What do you like about bugs?
What is the scientific name for a bug?
Do you have a favourite invertebrate you would like to tell the class about?
Do you know any invertebrates that are special to Australia?

Encourage students to use the term ‘invertebrates’ instead of the slang/common term ‘bugs’.

Learning extension: For Year 4 students, ask ‘Do you think invertebrates are producers, consumers, or decomposers? Why do you think that?’

Find Out: Meet our mates

Step 1

Explain to your students that they are going to explore the invertebrates of Australia. Ask your students if they know why Australia has such unique wildlife. Confirm with students that because Australia is isolated from the rest of the world by water, unique ecosystems have developed here, including unique animals. Just the reptiles and marsupials of Australia, many of our invertebrates are also unique. Let’s explore some of them!

Choose one of the following clips to show your students. It can be a good idea to choose a clip based on your students’ interests or your location.

Did you know? Aboriginal populations used Bogong moths as a food source 2,000 years ago. Researchers from Monash University and the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) identified traces of Bogong moth food on a stone tool found in a cave in the Victorian foothills of the Australian Alps. The microscopic residues were located on a small, portable grindstone, likely carried by its owners as they travelled. This work represents the first definitive archaeological evidence of insect food remains preserved on stone artefacts anywhere in the world (source).

Learning support: This video examines Australia’s native bees as a whole rather than focusing on one specific species. Students can answer the questions more generally and with less specific detail.

Step 2

After watching the clip, answer the following questions together as a class.

What was the name of the invertebrate?
Where does it live?
What did you find the most interesting about this invertebrate?
What threats does this invertebrate face?
For year 3 students: How does this invertebrate meet the criteria for being alive? (What does it eat? How does it reproduce? How does it move? How does it respond to its environment? Does it breathe? Does it make waste?)
For year 4 students: Is this invertebrate a decomposer, producer or consumer? And why do you think that?

Literacy extension: After showing students a clip, provide them with the Student Worksheet and let them conduct further research. You could do this as a whole class activity, as part of your literacy rotations, or as an extension task for individual students.

Step 3

Ask your students, ‘How do we know what invertebrates we have in Australia?’

Explain that when we find a new species of insect, we give it a scientific name, so we can tell it apart from the other species and keep records on where it is found and how many there are. Ask your students if they can determine who they think finds and names all the different invertebrates. Sometimes it’s scientists working in zoos or museums, but sometimes it’s school students.

Share the examples below with your class of species of wasps that were discovered by school students as part of the Insect Investigators Project.

Apanteles darthvaderi: A type of parasitic wasp discovered by Black Plains State School Students who thought the wasp had gone to the “dark side” because of the way the wasp “sucks the life out of caterpillars”.
Glyptapanteles drioplanetus: Discovered by Macclesfield Primary School in the Adelaide Hills, the name means ‘bush wanderer’.
Mirax supremus: named after the pinnacle science class at Beerwah State High School
Miropotes waikerieyeties: discovered by Waikerie Primary School in the Riverland, is named after Waikerie’s YETies (Youth Environment Team).
Choeras ramcomarmorata: discovered by Ramco Primary School in the Riverland, the name combines the place name Ramco with the Latin word for ‘marbled’ – because the colouration of the wasp resembled polished marble stone.

Source: A. Howe, et. al. (2024). “Catching ‘the bug’: Investigating insects through school-based citizen science increases intentions for environmental activities in students and teachers”, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aen.70004.

Step 4

Share with your students that about 110,000 species of invertebrates in Australia have been named and recorded, but around 200,000 species are still waiting to be named by Western science. Explain that today they are going to participate in Australia’s Bug Hunt and investigate what invertebrates they can find in their local environment.

Take Action: Hunting bugs

Step 1

Share the Bug Hunt visual explainer with your students. Use the slides to introduce the iNaturalist project, citizen science, and ethical bug hunting protocols to your students.

Step 2

Take your students outside to conduct their observations. Make sure students:

have their devices, hats, and sunscreen
understand where they are conducting the Bug Hunt and what the boundaries are
know how much time they will be spending on their survey
remember to fill the frame with their photographs, and take photos of the same bug from different angles
follow the Bug Hunt guidelines and be respectful.

Learning extension: Practice digital literacy skills with your students by uploading the images together. You could either do this as a whole class or use a few observations as demonstrations and let the students upload their observations in groups. They will need to locate all of the images attached to a particular observation, upload them to iNaturalist, select options about the observation that apply, and submit the observation.

Reflection

Step 1

When you return to the classroom, ask your students if they know which of the invertebrates they found were native species and which were invasive species. Use the following questions to facilitate a reflection discussion with your class:

Why are our native invertebrates so important?
What would happen to our environment if our native invertebrates disappeared?
What happens to our native invertebrates when invasive invertebrates come to Australia?

Bug Hunt: Are Bugs Alive?

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Lesson Guides and Printables

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Bug Hunt: Are Bugs Alive?

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Lesson Guides and Printables

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