Butterfly Life Cycle in Pictures

In our classroom, my firsties and I had a great time witnessing the metamorphosis of our Brassica caterpillars. I am delighted with the way this unit turned out. I used to order the Painted Lady larva, but it was hard for my kiddos to truly understand that caterpillars eat leaves because they came with that brown sludge in the cup instead, plus we never saw the egg part of the life cycle at all. This year I decided to cross my fingers and buy butterfly eggs from Carolina Biological instead. It was actually the same price ($14.99) to buy the eggs as it would be to buy caterpillar larva from another site. In addition, we had over 9 caterpillars hatch, and as of Friday afternoon, we had 9 butterflies compared to the 5 or 6 caterpillars I'd gotten in the past from other sites. I'm definitely doing this again next year!

Here's our Life Cycle in pictures:

When the caterpillars first hatched, they were so small we couldn't see them! We found evidence that they were around though! It wasn't until they were about 3 weeks old that we were able to pick them out with the naked eye:

Although not as colorful as the Painted Lady butterflies, the Brassica butterflies do have striking markings. My firsties loved their eye spots and quickly realized that they would make predators think twice about sneaking up on them!

We released the butterflies at the end of our Life Cycle unit! If you'd like to see the observation journals, labeling sheets and emergent readers that we used in our Butterfly Life Cycle unit, please check them out here.

The Caterpillars are Rampaging!

It's that time of year again - the count down to the end has begun! I'm desperately trying to cram all I can into these last 25 days! Unfortunately I don't have time for it all, so now I have to pick and choose which activities are must-dos and which can be skipped this year.

One thing that is going really well is our Butterfly Life Cycle unit. I am so happy I decided to go with eggs this year! For the first week or so after we placed the eggs on our plants we couldn't really tell we had caterpillars, except for a few small holes on the leaves. Well, this week we got a major lesson in the ravenous nature of caterpillars:

 At the beginning of the week we were thrilled that we could actually see the caterpillars and attempt to count them. We had some great discussions about camouflage and why it was important that the caterpillars blend in with the color of the leaves they like to eat. Look how lush all those cauliflower, cabbage, radish and brussel sprout plants look! I was really proud that we had succeeded in growing the plants our caterpillars needed.

 

Unfortunately, by Thursday the caterpillars had completely decimated our plants. Seemingly overnight we went from just a few leaves with holes to not a single leaf left!

  

 When we came in on Thursday morning we were able to get a more exact count of our caterpillars since they had decided to try to escape in search of more food - almost every caterpillar had made its way to the top of the netting!

 

This did enable us to finally get an up close and personal look at the little buggers :)

It also led to some great conversations about why farmers would have a problem with caterpillars. Although my littles love the caterpillars and think it's great that we can see them eating so much, they were able to put themselves in the farmers' shoes and realize that if they had caterpillars eating all the crops that would be very hard financially. We talked about how farmers stop bugs from eating their plants - using pesticides and even releasing lady bugs. I love how though-provoking science can be at this age - something as simple as watching caterpillars has led to some big connections! And, most of these conversations would not have been possible if we were using the caterpillars that come with the brown goop to eat!

UPDATE: For those of you curious as to where to get the eggs, I ordered mine from Carolina Biological. They sent enough eggs to ensure "5-6 butterflies" and we had at least 13 caterpillars hatch! If you're wondering about our plants, I blogged about that here. Once we were ready for the caterpillars I just transplanted our seedlings to a pot and placed it in our butterfly net.

Now that we've had to finish up our Plant Life Cycle and switch our caterpillars to cabbage leaves from the grocery store, we're setting up our incubator in preparation for our Chicken Life Cycle! I'm also considering whether we have time for these:

 Any clue what they are? Head over to  my FB page to guess! You could win your choice of Life Cycle packs from my store!

Alright, to finish up this post, here is a picture of Sullivan with Olaf - we couldn't resist when we saw it at JCPenny lol!

Butterfly Eggs & Foxy Math!

Good morning! Is time flying for you too?! It's almost the end of the year here (less than 35 days!) and I am frantically trying to fit it all in! First up, look how cute my little man is, now that I can't eat ANYTHING:

 His eczema was exacerbated by food allergies. So far we know that he's allergic to dairy, eggs, wheat, peanuts, soy and codfish. We're still waiting on more test results so we can add to the list lol. I cut all of those foods out of my diet and he is looking and feeling much better! We're crossing our fingers that he outgrows the allergies.

In classroom news, usually I'd be doing all Spring stuff, but it wasn't really Spring weather, so we did Fox. My students LOVE the Fox. When we've been really good, we get to dance to this video:

Anything to do with the Fox gets my kiddos super motivated - which is important for this time of year lol! I created "The Fox Says Math!" pack with a ton of printables and work station activities:

We've only done about 1/2 of the printables, and my students love them. This is not really a group of kids that likes to color, but they've been going to town trying to out-color each other with these papers!

Two of our favorite activities were the Fox Fact Family Forest and Measure the Foxes!

We also did Read & Write the Room with Missing Addends, Time to the Hour & 1/2 Hour, Clothespin Cards with Number Bonds and Missing Addends, and Foxy Ten Frames for those of us still working with number sense.

Next week we're finishing up our Plant Life Cycle pack so that we can start on our Butterfly Life Cycle pack! Look what came in the mail:

 Those are teeny tiny Brassica Butterfly eggs from Carolina Biological!

 We have our butterfly net set up with lots of Brassica plants - radish, brussel sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower!

The pamphlet said that the eggs would hatch 48-72 hours after placing the eggs on a plant, so I'm hoping we have some excitement when we come into school on Monday! I am so excited to get to see the whole development of the caterpillars!

I also got super exciting news this week: I'm teaching Pre-K next year! Well, maybe. After I said Yes! to the pre-k position a Kindergarten position opened up (one of our K teachers got a job in Japan!) I've thought about going back to my admin and asking for Kindergarten instead, but either way I'm moving down next year! I love my firsties, but my heart is with the little ones!

I'm also in the TPT newsletter this week for hitting a milestone! In celebration, ALL of my Math products are 20% off from April 6th-9th!

Have a fabulous week and be sure to check back for our WINNING Science Fair Experiment later in the week!

Plant Life Cycle Unit

We started our Plant Life Cycle study this week! I started now for two reasons - next week is Spring Break so when we get back to school on March 24th we should have some sprouting action within a few days. This cuts down on the wait time so that the kids aren't checking day after day with no results for so long! The other reason is that I want to start our Butterfly Life Cycle after Spring Break as well, and to do that we need plants! You see, this year I am ordering Brassica Butterfly eggs so that we can see the complete life cycle from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly - in the past with the Painted Lady caterpillars I ordered we always skipped the egg phase. Since we won't be getting that nasty "food" stuff that comes with the caterpillars (and really, the kids are always confused that caterpillars eat leaves but come with brown sludge lol) we need to have some Brassica family plants ready to feed our caterpillars when they hatch!

I start our Life Cycle study by putting together a folder for each student. I make sure to buy enough of each color folder at the beginning of the year when they're on sale so that I have one for each student. The green folders are always Plant Life Cycle, my blue ones will be for Butterfly Life Cycle, and yellow will be for Chicken Life Cycle. This means that when I tell the students to get out their Plant Life Cycle stuff they just have to grab their green folder and they're ready!

In the left side pocket go all of the printable sheets - life cycle calendar, labeling pages, kwl sheets, sequencing sheets, writing prompts and color by code sheet. The right hand side has the easy reader and the Observation Journal.

 

I always start my seeds in a Jiffy Greenhouse - the kids love seeing the little peat pellets absorb the water and expand! Then everyone gets a turn to poke a hole and plant some seeds. This year we planted radish, cauliflower, brussel sprouts and cabbage to hopefully feed our Brassica Butterflies!

I'm lucky enough to have huge windows, so we set our greenhouse in the window and wait for sprouts.

Every day we get our folders out and complete part of our unit.

 

 The kids love the Plant Life Cycle reader - we take our time coloring it and read it each day:

 The labeling and sequencing sheets are favorites too:

But, my favorite part is the Observation Journal. There are 10 pages of prompts for students to draw pictures, answer questions, and describe the life cycle.

One of the best things is that whenever someone comes to visit us, the students can quickly grab their folder, bring the visitor to our greenhouse area and show off all they know about the life cycle!