Butterfly Update

We are now on day 3 of the chrysalis stage! The kids are waiting patiently for our butterflies to emerge, and are even more excited now after being able to see them at the bug fair.

We got lucky and all 5 of our caterpillars seem to have made it this far. This morning after observations, I finally took them out of their cup and pinned them inside the netted cage. I have to admit, I'm a bit creeped out by the way they look.

I was searching around for other butterfly ideas, and came across Mama Jenn's blog, and her neat idea to use butterfly pictures to make a matching game. Bunny loves plays it the most, but the boys did have fun with it too! I did it the same way Mama Jenn did, and it seems to be holding up fairly well since it's laminated.

Tonight I hope to get started on making some pumpkin experiment sheets, so we can start on those experiments soon :)

Insect Fair and Pumpkin Patch

Since the boys had football games yesterday, we decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone today. We celebrated Babe's 10th birthday, and had a field trip related to insects (what were studying in science). I love when things work out like this!

Orion loved all of the creepy crawling live bugs they had, evident by all of his hovering around the hissing cockroaches and scorpions.


Raymond got to hold butterflies, and loved having a sneak peak at what ours will look like soon. And of course we gravitated towards the snakes :)


And Bunny just had a ball looking and touching everything. That's my girl, she's not afraid of anything!
There were so many beautiful butterflies, and moths (who would have thought).

Of course I had to bring a few home, to start our own collection :) and the kids were gifted some praying mantis cocoons from a family friend. What a great science unit this has become for us! First watching caterpillars turn into butterflies, and now we'll be able to watch a different type of insect cocoon.

Of course, there was plenty of time to goof around too! This was after our family race, which tired us all out because of all the hills.

Picking the perfect pumpkins was fun, but man was that a task! Everyone had a different idea of what the perfect pumpkin was, so of course I got to be the deciding factor, because I have plans for them. I have 3 seperate experiments I want to use them for, along with making pumpkin pie and pumpkin seeds from them. It was a great day!

Is it a chrysalis yet?

We've watched for almost a week now, as our itty bitty caterpillars have nearly doubled in size overnight, every night since we've had them. The kids are loving this, but driving me insane in the process, because they aren't changing fast enough for them. This morning their all hanging on the top of the container, so hopefully soon we'll have some chrysalis pictures to show.

Everyday the kids fill out an observation page, by drawing a picture and writing about what they see happening. Then we do some sort of butterfly craft (sorting life cycles, making caterpillars, painting butterflies, etc.). See the little container in the middle of the boys? Yup, those are our bugs!


Here's what our observation sheets look like. I can't find the link, but I got them from the scholastic website, in a section with butterfly resources. This is Orion's page, and forgive me because I can't figure out how to turn my picture, so sideways it stays :)


From right to left, Orion's, Raymond's, and Olivia's water color painted butterflies. They had fun doing this.
Boo Boo is still loving hooked on phonics, and I really feel like it's helping him. He does still have a hard time remembering sound blends and guesses at words a lot, but I think that's due to the dyslexia. Were still working out some details to have him tested for it.

Bunny is working on the letter D and number 4 this week. I really need to get better at taking more pictures as the kids work. We started with big and little D sorting, letter D lacing, reading Dinosaur Roar, making a dinosaur egg, watching the movie Dinosaur, and some number 4 grouping.
She also loved doing the paint brush color matching with this awesome file folder game. Ignore the Pomeranian under the table, he was chasing the cat :)