Butterflies have hatched!

What an exciting Monday morning! We came in this morning and found...LOTS of hungry butterflies! We mixed up some sugar water for them to drink. During the day we've gotten to see a few come out of their chrysalises. The kids are amazed at the crumpled wings and meconium (fluid from inside the chrysalis). Such a neat experience!

Beautiful Painted Lady Butterflies!

The kids were very excited to see the butterflies using their proboscises to drink.

Here we are ready to play butterfly tag. I set up large, rope circles which served as different "flowers" for the butterflies to drink from and pollinate. Once they visited one kind of flower, they had to go pollinate the same kind of flower before they could visit another kind of flower. They also had to drink from each flower through their proboscis (party blower). AND to top that off, they had to run from birds/predators. It was so much fun, though we had a few injured butterflies in the process.

drinking nectar from the flowers

To finish off our study of butterflies, the kids had one final task to complete. They had to use the food given to them to create a caterpillar. They had to include all of the parts of the caterpillar and be able to tell me what each part is and what it does. Ask your child where these parts are located and what each part does (eyes- there are 6, prolegs- there are 10, trulegs- there are 6, bristles, spiracles).

I hope your child learned a lot about the lifecycle of butterflies through these experiences! We will set our butterflies free later this week.

Mrs. Jackson has been coming to our room every Friday to do Enrichment lessons with the class. She decided to conquer a fear (i.e. try something she'd never done before) by holding a rat. She and Lilly really took to each other!

On Friday, she is going to hold Lovey, our hairless rat. Yea, Mrs. Jackson!