Going on a Bug Hunt!

For those of you who don't know out there, John and I are Sunbeams teachers at church, so we teach the 3-4 year old kids.  The kids in our class are really cute (one of which we babysat when we were parents for a weekend), and we have a lot of fun teaching them.  Lately most of our lessons have been about things that Jesus created for us and how thankful we are for them (i.e. "I am Thankful for the Day and Night," "I am Thankful for Animals," etc...).  Well this last week happened to be "I am Thankful for Birds and Insects."  Whew, a whole 50 minutes talking about that with kids that have the attention spans of goldfish?  We came up with some fun things to keep them entertained though...  One of which involved John and I going on a bug hunt!  

We had heard a cricket in our garage earlier that night and decided it would be fun if we could catch the cricket to show the kids.  So we geared up...

 

We used the red lights on our headlamps so as to retain our night vision and not scare off the bugs.  Then we got our cups ready and had a few practice runs to make sure we were swift enough to catch them.

Once we were sure we were ready we went in.  Mind you, I've never really been on any kind of a bug hunt before.  We found that cricket pretty quick, he was right by the door.  John went for him and just as the cup hit the ground I squealed!  Anyone who knows me knows that I can be jumpy at times.  Yeah, this was one of those times... We then started looking for any other bugs that we could catch to show the kids.  I lifted up our broom to find a NASTY COCKROACH!  I was super grossed out, but I managed to pull myself together and catch it.  I had to think of the children!  Again, I squealed when my cup hit the ground.  And I'm pretty sure there was another squeal in there somewhere...

We took them inside and put plastic over the cups.  Here are the bugs we caught:

DISGUSTING!

All in all it was a pretty eventful night.  We had a lot of fun, and the kids loved looking at the bugs last Sunday.  We just told them that the cockroach was a beetle, so as not to gross them (or their parents) out.  I told John we need to make sure there aren't any more left in our garage and kill them if there are.  So we'll be setting up some nice cockroach hotels in the garage, that's for sure.  Luckily they're not in our house, so that's a blessing.  That being said though, we do have another bug in our house....