Amazing Antics: Life Inside an Ant Colony by Emma Wood is a rich, accessible non-fiction text that takes students inside the fascinating world of ants, revealing how these tiny insects live, communicate, and work together in highly organised communities. Through clear explanations, labelled diagrams, and engaging facts, the text explores ant colonies as complex systems, drawing connections between ant behaviour and human societies. Students learn about roles within the colony, nest structures, communication methods such as pheromones, and the remarkable adaptability of ants across different environments.

Blending scientific information with visual support and real-world examples, the text encourages curiosity, questioning, and deeper understanding of the Living World. It supports learners to build content knowledge while developing skills in reading informational texts, making inferences, and synthesising ideas, making it an ideal text for integrated literacy and science learning in the upper primary classroom.

This pack includes three clearly structured lesson overviews designed to support close, shared and independent reading. Each lesson provides a direct link to the text, purposeful warm-up questions, focused do now activities, explicit teaching of key technical and subject-specific language, exit tickets, and opportunities for student self-assessment.

The three lesson overviews focus on:

1. Comprehension and inferencing, supporting students to locate information, make meaning, and draw conclusions from the text;

2. The author’s use of language and structure, exploring how word choice, sentence structure, and text features shape meaning; and

3. Author’s purpose and themes, encouraging students to think critically about ideas, messages, and viewpoints.

Curriculum Phase: Phase 2

Year Level: Year 5

English: reading for meaning, identifying and synthesising key ideas, understanding informational text structure, using subject-specific vocabulary, making inferences, summarising information, and supporting responses with evidence from the text
Science – Living World: animal behaviour, ecosystems and habitats, adaptation and survival, interdependence, classification, and communication in living organisms

Text type: Non-fiction, informational text, scientific report

Key words include: animals, ants, ant colonies, biology, caste system, colonies, communication, community, ecosystems, habitats, insects, informational text, Living World, nests, non-fiction, pheromones, predator and prey, science literacy, species, supercolonies, worker ants, queen ant