Project Ant Farm, or wait, I mean project ant trap

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!


Our home is in a nature preserve and we aren't poison type people where we do not use poisonous substances to get rid of insects, so we will see spiders and ants and roly polys, an occasional mouse and other little critters from time to time that sneak into our home.  I generally do not like to harm them and will often use the vacuum or get them outside somehow rather than smashing them.  Well, unless it is a really scary spider, but anyway, every winter, around January or February, we get little ants.  They usually invade the bathroom, but this year, it was the kitchen.  I finally put up an ant trap, but that did not go over well.  They prefer what is on the kitchen counter rather than the ant trap deadly goodies, so I came up with a better idea and I asked my 7 year old son if he would be interested in making an ant farm.  Of course the answer was yes, so I googled it and we were on our way to having about 500 pet ants who went from pest to pets in a matter of minutes.




First, my son remembered that he had a 5 gallon aquarium.  We had originally got it for fish, but they did not do well in there for some reason, maybe the small size, and died.  Then he decided to use it for his pet rock, which is a pretty easy pet to keep alive since it is, well, a rock.  Today, he thought it would be a great home for his ant farm and he was right.  It had pebbles in the bottom, but I thought they may like a sand or soil where they could burrow.  I thought and thought and since there is still about a foot of snow on the ground outside, that was out and I was thinking of the soil from our house plants, but that did not seem like a good idea, so Mr. Smarty pants suggested the ash from the fireplace and this seemed perfect.  So I shoveled out some of the ash from the fireplace and put about a 3 to 4 inch layer of that on top of the rocks.  My son then put his pet rocks in there for them to climb on and his fake plants that were supposed to be for his dead fish, and voila, ant farm. 




The next step was to catch the ants which I did not see as much of a challenge since their population going from the laundry room to the kitchen under their little secret crack between the wall and the counter seemed to be endless.  If we put a little coconut oil or honey on the counter, they were immediately on it.  So our approach was to put honey at the end of a cotton swab and catch about 10 at a time as the little nosy creatures crept out of their little secret hiding place.  So the rest of the afternoon was spent catching ants, which felt strange to me because usually I'm trying to kill ants, not catch them.  We even noticed the queen ant got in there somehow, but neither of us remembered catching her.  She was easy to spot because she is bigger than the others and has wings.  So we had our ants.  We put one of the dry muffins I made yesterday in there because they honestly were not very good and some globs of coconut oil and honey and the busy workers were fed and happy so they started burrowing their little secret passageways in the ash.  This was probably almost as exciting for me and it was for my children because I have never had an ant farm and never thought about having an ant farm until today.  So like most projects with unschooling, it was very spontaneous, inspirational and educational all at one time and a great way to spend a winter afternoon.


My daughter named the queen ant, Princess.  We did agree on no new pets this year, but since these were already in the house, we will let this one slide. 







Day 2 of project ant farm: 


Adding water to ash can produce lye.  We have no plans to add water, but this was brought to my attention and lye can burn your skin.    I would recommend using a different substance than ash, but the idea of the ant farm I thought was a great one.  :)


After learning about the lye, I checked the ant farm and the ants died.  So sad. However, a great ant trap would be to fill a container with ash for them to burrow topped with honey and coconut oil and you have yourself a very effective ant trap.  :)  This project had a bit of a twist.  I will add to this blog as we experiment some more with the ant farm.


We replaced the ash with wood shavings.  My son is still disappointed that his idea did not work for an ant farm, but there is still hope. 


Day 3 of project ant farm:


Well, we don't have a lot of ants left now, but the wood shavings seem to be adequate, but not ideal.  My husband decided to step in with project ant farm and use a jar and find soil this weekend, that way my son can watch them burrow again without causing their doom.  So this has been a fun learning experience for all of us.  I would definitely recommend having an ant farm, especially if you have an ant problem in your house rather than calling the poison people.  Good luck!