Odors and Cricket Behavior

• An interesting idea for a third-grade project gets your students studying crickets and their reaction to different odors in a shoebox. First, set up the experiment by placing roughly a dozen live crickets in an empty regular shoebox. Have your students observe the crickets for a period of 10 minutes as you prepare the cotton balls. Take individual cotton balls and douse each one in a different pungent substance, such as almond, peppermint, vanilla, perfumes, household cleaners and fruit juices. To allow your third-graders to carry out their observations, place each doused cotton ball into the center of the shoebox for a period of five minutes and wait at least 10 minutes between using each cotton ball to allow the previous odor to dissipate.
  
  

Keep an Ant Colony

• Engage your third-graders with this insect experiment as they witness the process of ants moving around a formicary (ant colony). To conduct this observation-based experiment in the classroom, set up an ant farm by collecting a fertilized queen ant and placing it in a store-bought ant farm container. Once your ant farm has a healthy ant population, place it in a position where your third-grade students can observe the ant behavior and draw pictures of what they see. Experiment by placing a few small pieces of bread (roughly the size of a sugar cube) at the top of the formicary. Have students observe the ant's caste system, as the worker ants transport the food through the formicary.
  
  

Using Soda as Bait

• One experiment that allows your third-grade students to get out of the classroom and into the sunshine gets students investigating which sodas are best at attracting insects and pests. Using their results, students can determine which type of soda would be best to use as bait to divert insects away from a picnic. To complete the experiment, have third-graders select five different sodas, such as cola and root beer, for example, and place some of each soda in measuring cups next to one another on a picnic table. Students should then sit or stand at least a few feet away and count each time an insect lands on or in each measuring cup by marking a tally against that soda type's name on a sheet of paper.
  
  

Crickets and Temperature

• Carry out this experiment on a set of evenings when you can hear crickets chirping. To conduct the experiment, which tests whether or not the number of cricket chirps in the atmosphere are affected by the air temperature, count the number of chirps you hear from crickets for 10-minute spells. Using a thermometer, have students check the air temperature at the start and end of each 10-minute spell and average the two by adding the two temperatures together and dividing by two. Students should repeat this 10-minute test at least two more times, so they have counted chirps for 30 minutes in total. Have students then average their results for an evening before repeating the entire experiment on a discernibly warmer or colder evening. Have students compare their overall findings, and determine whether or not they can predict the air temperature based on the number of cricket chirps.