Thursday, April 25, 2019

Butterflies!

The last two days, we've watched as our butterflies emerged from their cocoons, one-by-one.  Rather than edit last week's insect blog entry to add a few butterfly photos, I feel that these are special enough to create an entirely separate post.  Enjoy!






















Thank you for letting us hold you, butterflies!  And thank you for pollinating our flowers!

Monday, April 15, 2019

April 15th, 2019

These last two weeks, we went buggy.

Kicking off our new unit, we bugged out the classroom...



and built our own mini entomology lab.

Then, we started with ladybugs.
We looked at ladybugs...
  

we held ladybugs...


we held ladybugs while painting ladybugs...

we read about ladybugs...

we found pretend ladybugs...

and we counted ladybugs on a leaf.

Some of us were not crazy about discovering that ladybugs fly, however.

Then, we were on to caterpillars.  We looked at the teeniest caterpillars we've ever seen... 



and watched as they grew big enough to transfer to their milkweed habitat.



In the meantime, we counted caterpillars on a leaf...

we matched butterflies...

we read about the butterfly life cycle...

we made predictions about our caterpillars...

and we made some butterfly life cycle art.


Next, was cricket day!


We drew cricket pictures...

we watched cricket documentaries...

and we played cricket dice games (which was also inclusive of all bugs)...

Finally, the ants.  It's hard to tell which were the overall classroom favorites, but ants were definitely in the top 4.


They dug...

and dug...

and dug!

As they dug, we made some ant art...

and ant counting books.

We also started our research projects.

Each student chose their favorite classroom insect.  Then, we spent a week researching and writing our informative books.


So that we could end our incredible insect unit with a huge presentation that we completely rocked!




Stay tuned for butterflies!!!