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 :)

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 :)

Letter C and caterpillars

After being sick, we had to condense a weeks worth of school into 3 days. I did some rearranging, and took a lot out, but we fit it in.


Last week the boys were studying insects, so I thought it would be a good idea to order some bugs we could observe. What better than caterpillars! I ordered a butterfly garden from amazon, which came pretty fast, and ordered the bugs online. Our caterpillars came in on Wednesday, and we've been observing them since.

Bunny worked on the letter C, which gave us a chance to read Caps for sale. She made a monkey mask, and loved it! A few other things she did (that I didn't get pictures of) was a cupcake number matching, a hat game, and monkeys in a tree, and sorting big and little C.

We also read Cat in a hat, and made our own hats. We went shopping for Halloween costumes later in the day, and she wore the hat out :)