Carla Miller said her students usually get antsy as the end of the school year draws near. But not like this.

Ask Miller’s first-graders about ants and hands go up, some accompanied by gasps.

These Mallett School scientists have been studying ants. They’ve researched them, wrote books, made movies, set up ant farms, designed a bulletin board and even wrote down words that rhyme with “ant.”

Kayla Bard said she and classmates ordered the harvester ants along with food and sand through a catalog.

Miller used a $400 educational grant to buy a digital microscope. It connects to a computer and is linked to a television, so all the students can watch the ants.

Children also monitor the black and red ants by peering through the clear walls of the ant farms on the observation table. But they get a closer look with the microscope and the images it transfers to the TV screen.

Before the ants arrived, students wrote down everything they knew about ants. They knew a lot of ant facts, Miller said. Some were accurate, some weren’t.

Students made up questions and talked about how they would find the answers.

“We looked on the Internet,” Chris Conklin said.

“We could use books,” Eve Fuerstenberger said.

Anja Nordstrom said they tried ant experiments and each of the children writes questions down and stores them in “wonder boxes.” They then find the answers and write them on the back of index cards.

“It’s an inquiry-based science approach,” Miller said of the project.

They discovered as they watched that “the ants were working hard to move the dirt and make their tunnels,” Nordstrom said.

They mixed dirt and sand in a homemade farm made from plastic bottles, but the ants died. There was no queen ant to lay any eggs. It’s not legal to transfer queen ants through the mail, Miller said.

Another ant fact for the student-scientists at Mallett.

dperry@sunjournal.com