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 contains a range of structured literacy activities including

• Spelling rules ck / dge / drop the e / y as a consonant or vowel
• Sounds of -ed
• Exploring parts of language - adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs etc
• Doubling or not when adding -ing, -ed
• Floss rules
• Compound words
• Identifying and naming suffixes
• Identifying and naming prefixes
• Vowel teams
• Root words
• Controlling 'r'
• Diagraphs
• Schwa words
• Ghost diagraphs
• -oo- and -oo- / -au and -ow / 
• Hard and soft c and g
• Common subordinating conjunctions
• And much more!!

 

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