A praying mantis helped me teach my kids

Having the ability to look up anything at any moment still blows my mind.  How many of you know how to care for a praying mantis that your 5th graders found and decided we should keep as a class pet?

Remember when we had to actually look things up in an Encyclopedia?  You know, those books that lined the back bookcase, and never fail, was missing the one you needed?  Or worse yet, we had to go to the library to look up books using the card catalog.  (Can you remember the Dewey Decimal System?)

A simple search of Google on "How do I care for a praying mantis?" soon had us scrambling for all the things to make our new "friend" a proper home.  Some of my kids asked if they could look up food items a praying mantis would eat.  I agreed to let them do it at recess.  Soon I had kids scouring the campus looking for some crickets, moths, butterflies, and anything else they thought our mantis would eat.

What started as a bunch of questions being shot at me faster than I could even process, became the personal mission of a few students to see how long our mantis could survive.  I heard many leave that afternoon saying they'd look up things that night.

If I had told them to look in a book, they would have found the answers.  But instead they watched videos people had posted, read facts of websites, and became "experts" in their mind.

We've caught many insects with the sole purpose of feeding our mantis.  We even put two mantises together and witnessed the act of mating (um, yeah...that got a laugh from the parents and teachers around campus!) and then the customary eating of the male afterwards.   Soon we witnessed the laying of an egg sack and once again hit up Google for, "how to care for a praying mantis egg sack".  Today we eagerly anticipate what will happen next.

Could I have taught them all the information on a praying mantis?  Yes.  I could have looked up everything and sounded like an expert.  But instead I let my kids teach me.  Actually, I think Man Eater (thanks, Hall and Oats) taught us.