Insects

Today we read one of my all time favorite stories The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  This story gave the children an insight into the life cycle of a butterfly.  In the afternoon we received a shipment of caterpillar larva.  We are going to take care of them as a class and watch them progress through their life cycle.

 At one center the children completed the first few pages in the Butterfly Life Cycle book that we are making.  On the first page they glued a leaf and drew an egg on it.  The second page had the following sentence on it:  When the caterpillar hatches, he eats and eats and eats.  For this page the children used a hole punch to punch holes in the leaf to make it look like it was eaten.  They then used circle stickers to pattern a caterpillar on the leaf.

 At another of our centers today the children made a caterpillar.  They used a clothespin and pom poms to make it.  When it was finished they placed it in a brown lunch bag(the chrysalis).  We then hung the chrysalises from the hooks in our ceiling.  The caterpillars will now rest as they go through metamorphosis.