Several small pitchers or pouring containers and plastic cups with lines marked at various heights.The illustrations depict the story from an ants point of view which makes this a wonderful first mystery story for young children. As they go to gather the crystals, two ants decide not to return with their fellow ants but to stay and eat crystals forever.

Helping Your Child to become Creative so that they can help change the world.īook Play Everyday Teaching Preschoolers Through the Love of BooksĪ colony of ants discover delicious crystals in a far off place.

Helping Your Preschooler Prepare for Reading.Multiple Intelligence and Children’s Learning.The Value of Play Dough in Early Childhood.The Importance of Teaching Classroom Rules.Sanford Schwartz, New York Times, November 13, 1988. CHILDREN'S BOOKS FELONS IN THE SUGAR BOWL.Nel likens the book's resulting ambiguity to the works of Magritte. While the ants' return to the colony suggests 'a victory for the bosses' and the narrative could be considered a ' capitalist parable', the comparatively huge appliances in the kitchen, which terrify the ants, imply conspicuous consumption. In Philip Nel's analysis, a conflict between the book's plot and its illustrations leads to artistic tension. Chastened, they rejoin a line of ants carrying sugar cubes back to the colony. They experience misadventures: they land in a cup of coffee (after a giant spoon shovels up the sugar cubes into the coffee and gets the ants out), almost get toasted on an English muffin (after mistaking it for a giant disc-a 'hiding place disc'-with holes), fall into a sink, get threatened by its garbage disposal unit, and are nearly electrocuted when they enter an electric outlet. But during daylight, the ants are shoveled up by a giant sugar bowl spoon. The two ants decide that instead of taking one sugar cube for themselves (like the other ants) and leave for their ant hill, they will live in the sugar bowl forever and 'eat the tasty treasure forever'.

The title characters, while journeying through a human home, decide to exploit a sugar bowl-full of sugar cubes-on their own rather than taking one sugar cube for themselves like the colony's queen (so each of the ants get one sugar cube and so does the queen ant). Two Bad Ants is a 1988 children's book written and illustrated by American author Chris Van Allsburg.

Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg