A couple of posts ago, I talked about the book Two Bad Ants by VanAllsburg. This weekend my grandson and I had a chance to put some of that story into action.

First, he discovered a trail of ants leading to a sugar bowl in my studio.

Inspection of the sugar bowl revealed that there were indeed 2 bad ants in the container. In the book, two ants stayed behind instead of following the other ants back to give the queen a crystal treasure.

I asked my little buddy if he would like to put the ants in a brown lake (coffee) an action that occurs in the book. He said “No – a red lake.” So, we made a red lake and many more than just those two ants were plunged into it. Actually, a good deal of the sugar also went into the lake.

We discussed the rest of the book, but decided against putting our ants in the toaster or electrical socket as happens in the story. Eventually, we just laid them out on waxed paper to rest. By the next morning, we had true SUGAR ants, but we DID NOT eat them!