We Have Butterflies

 Our caterpillars have been causing quite the excitement in our classroom. Every day the children have been rushing in to both get ready for the day and to check and see what our caterpillars were doing and how they have changed.


We have been spending time watching our caterpillars and noticing how they are changing as they grow.

 


Changes in the caterpillars, their chrysalis and then having butterflies has been a source of excitement in the classroom the past few weeks.

We Have Butterflies

 

Our caterpillars have been causing quite the excitement in our classroom.  Every morning the children have been rushing in to both get ready for the day and to check and see what our caterpillars were doing and how they had changed.


We have been spending time watching our caterpillars and noticing how they are changing as they grow.

Here's a short video of use working hard sketching what we notice about our caterpillars.

I am sure you can hear our excitement as we talk about what we are seeing.

You can never have a close enough look!

Changes in the caterpillars, their chrysalis and then having butterflies has been a source of excitement in the classroom the past few weeks.

We've also had a lot of fun learning a song about how a caterpillar grows and changes.

Yesterday was a big day at school.
We have been watching our butterflies for several days now and knew it was time to let them go.

We are hoping the butterflies are going to come back and visit us one day.

We enjoyed getting to see a butterfly up close.

We were hoping to catch a butterfly!

Arrival of our caterpillars

Our butterfly larvae recently arrived in our classroom.

From the beginning their arrival has caused quite a stir.

At first we were curious about what was in the boxed marked: "Live Specimens".

We spent time listening to see if we could hear anything in the box before we opened it.

Students enjoyed sharing many different ideas about what was in the box!

 

We have been watching our caterpillars closely over the last few weeks to see how quickly they are growing and changing.

 

We are closely watching the caterpillars crawling in our butterfly house.

We have spent time trying to count all the caterpillars we see.

We have been reading many stories about caterpillars and butterflies and have been learning a lot about how they grow and change.

As our caterpillars have been growing we have been taking time to try and sketch/draw what we are observing.

Students are being encouraged to both add details of what they see and to explain their drawings.

A highlight recently was letting the caterpillars crawl on us before we put them back into their houses.

At first we weren't sure how the caterpillars would feel but we soon discovered they were tickly when they crawled.

Caterpillar Excitement

Our butterfly larvae recently arrived in our classroom.

From the beginning their arrival has caused quite a stir.

At first we were curious about what was in the boxed marked: "Live Specimens"

We watched closely to see what was inside.

 We were excited to discovered a container of caterpillars.

We examined the container closely and soon noticed how small the caterpillars were.

 

After observing the caterpillars for a few days we helped mix more food and move the caterpillars into their own houses so they would have more room to grow.

We have been watching our caterpillars closely over the last few weeks to see how quickly they are growing and changing.

We have been reading many stories about caterpillars and butterflies and have been learning a lot about how they grow and change.

As our caterpillars have been growing we have been taking time to try and sketch/draw what we are observing.

Students are being encouraged to both add details of what they see and to explain their drawings.

Our highlight this week was having the caterpillars crawl on us before returning them to their little houses.

We are watching closely to see when they will start to form their chrysalis and when they will change into butterflies.

Representing Spring

Students have continued to show a lot of interest in the Spring changes they are observing outside.

To capture this interest in the classroom we continued our classroom web about Spring.

As we read different Spring stories we added ideas to our idea web.

After adding many ideas to our web we decided to provide students with plasticine to represent their ideas of Spring.

Students quickly expressed an interest in the different ways they could manipulate the plasticine to represent Spring. 

Once their Spring representation was completed we recorded students’ description of their representations.

Through these representations students practiced many different skills, including;

Learning Links:

Social/Emotional: Persistence, Sharing materials with others

Physical: Fine motor skills-pinching, rolling, squeezing plasticine

Intellectual: Representing an idea using a variety of materials, Communicating ideas to others

Spiritual: Connecting to nature, Creativity

Here's a short video highlighting students' creations and their explanations:

Create your own free photo slideshow

A Shopping We Will Go Project

Students were recently engaged in a variety of grocery store and food based activities, including:

• playing in our classroom grocery store
• bringing empty food boxes to school to add to our store
• experimenting with paint to create different colored food
• making and eating fruit and vegetable rainbows
• creating shopping lists
• visiting a realy grocery store
• deciding to recycle our food boxes when our project was done
• walking to the recycling bins

Through all of these activites students were actively involved and excited about what we were doing at school.

Here is a short presentation of the different activities students were involved in over the course of this project and some of the learning that took place:

A Shopping We Will Go Project

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Happy Mother's Day

We hope you all had a fantastic Mother's Day.

We had a lot of fun creating many special projects for our moms.

While working on all of our Mother's Day projects we were learning and working on:

Social/Emotional: Sharing materials with others, working collaboratively
Physical: Fine motor skills-pencil grip while writing and colouring, scissor skills
Intellectual: Sharing ideas with others, Vocabulary-names of different seeds
Spiritual: Celebrating a special occasion, Connecting to nature-taking care of our herb gardens and watching them grow

Here's a short video of some of our hard work:

http://smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a45314d7a51344d54453d0d0a&blogview=true