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 wide range of response activities including:

• A guided reading plan exploring key literacy elements including inference and deduction, language use, making connection and text organisation, along with key questioning to promote emotional intelligence, metacognition and compassionate inquiry. 
• An independent learning contract complete with explainer videos for activity clarity
  
• A wide range of response activities to support developing and embedding key literacy skills including sentence and word work, spelling, and cloze activities. 

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