January 17, 2011
I received this charming note from a San Antonio 4th grader named Alicia. She had been reading my book BIG BUGS, and did this drawing on which she wrote that the insect was supposed to be a cricket, but “I don’t know how to draw a cricket.”
Actually, Alicia, you’ve made a pretty good start. Although we casually refer to “bugs,” bugs actually include two different species – insects and spiders (Arachnids). All insects have 6 legs, but spiders have 8 legs (they are not insects). A cricket is an insect, and you have definitely drawn an insect.
To make it look even more like a cricket, you could give it very long back legs, as you see in this photograph. Crickets use their four front legs for walking, and their two back legs are long and strong, so that they can make big leaps.
The very regular chirping of crickets is a common night sound in many places. As the temperature drops, their singing becomes slower and the pitch of the chirp gets lower. Some people use the chirp rate of crickets to estimate the temperature. I wrote about this in my book ANIMAL FACT, ANIMAL FABLE. Crickets are pretty interesting insects!
Posted by: Seymour Simon
