Why are we investigating 'minibeasts' this term?
Because earlier this week we received an email from a Professor. B. Cairfel
This is what the email said:
Dear 2M Gems,
I have recently returned from a visit to your beautiful city. I spent a great deal of my time there bushwalking, visiting wildlife reserves and nearby national parks. I was surprised by the variety of minibeasts that I saw.
As I am a leading entomologist here in Boulder. I am very interested in learning more about the minibeasts in your locality.
I would like to enlist your help to study these animals. I am keen to know more about the types of minibeasts you have, their features, behaviours, habitats and eating habits as well as their life cycles. I thought your class might also be interested in designing and making devices for collecting and observing the minibeasts.
I am very concerned about the wellbeing of your specimens. The collection and observation chambers will need to be designed so that you do not have to handle the minibeast and the chambers must provide for their every need.
After observing your minibeasts, I would be honoured if you could write a report to share what you have learnt about them with me. Unfortunately, I am not able to return to your great city to meet with you, examine your minibeast viewer and discuss your findings.
Other entomologists and I share our findings with each other via a wiki. This is a great way for people from all around the world to share in a common space. I thought that as you are already familiar with blogging, you might like to create a wiki as a way of sharing your findings with me.
Yours sincerely,
Professor B. Cairfel
We are very excited about Professor B. Cairfel's request but we have these questions -
What are minibeasts?
What's a scientist and what do they do?
What's a report and how do you write one?
What's a wiki?
Today we looked at the first two questions.
In discussing what a 'minibeast' is, realised we had even more questions.
Here's a mind-map that will direct our inquiry into minibeasts
and here is a mind-map to show what we already know about scientists.
To help Professor B. Cairfel learn about the minibeasts in our area, we will need to think and act like scientists too and that's going to be fun!
