Friday, April 8, 2005

Caterpillars that we ordered

I wish I could get a picture of our caterpillars, but my camera is not that good. We got these in the mail last Friday in a little plastic cup with a lid. The cup has about a half inch of some kind of solid agar stuff for them to eat. You do not open the cup at all until they are pupa. They have tripled their size in the past week, it is just amazing.

The cup thing is really gross now. Since you don't open the cup and clean it out...well. And the caterpillars spin silk to crawl around on. I think it would be more educational to raise them where you can just feed them with leaves, etc. It has been interesting to see them grow so much, but you don't get a picture of how much they eat. I wonder how hard it is to find their eggs? I'm sure this cup method is better for classrooms so you don't need to take care of them every day.

We are waiting for them to climb to the top of the cup and turn into chrysalids. Hope it is not while we are gone to Grandma's!

We'll keep updated and maybe I can at least get a picture of a butterfly. I looked online for a unit study on butterflies and I guess I will have to make my own. There are some available for purchase, but how hard can it be to make your own, especially for a Kindergarten/1st grader. I'll bet I can do better than representing the life stages with different shapes of pasta. Yeah, that was actually an idea. Ooookay.

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