Last Friday we were very lucky to see our beautiful butterfly emerge from it’s chrysalis. Heidi B came up with a lovely name – Harmony – for our new butterfly. As Harmony Day is coming up on Monday and Harmony had a lovely orange colour on her wings. Thanks Heidi B for the great name suggestion.
Here’s our clip of Harmony emerging from her chrysalis.
After Harmony had dried her wings for a few hours she started fluttering her wings and we released her into the garden outside our classroom.
We have been very lucky to be given to caterpillars for our classroom to observe. We’ve had 1 caterpillar for over a week now and it’s body is making huge changes.
The caterpillar ate lots and lots and LOTS of green leaves – it seemed to double in size each night from eating so much.
Then it hung upside down and in the shape of the letter j. Under it’s skin it began to form a chrysalis and it’s feet and head were no longer needed. The antenna shrivelled up and it worked it’s old skin upwards and it’s body downwards.
Then, over the next few minutes we watched the caterpillar push the old skin right out of the way. Then it gyrated as it finally got rid of all of it’s old skin.
Then it puled up the chrysalis shape we all know and then the formation of the chrysalis was complete.
Now we’re waiting to see how long it will be until the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. It’s been 4 days now and we’ll try to record it emerging from the chrysalis.
What changes have you noticed about our caterpillar?
What colour do you think the butterfly might have on it’s wings?
Here’s a YouTube clip showing the metamorphosis process.
Here’s caterpillar number 2 – who’s followed exactly the same process. It made it’s chrysalis today…..in a matter of minutes.
During Science investigations with Mrs Nelson our class used digital microscopes to continue our research about looking at materials and objects very closely.
Mrs Nelson had a set of digital microscopes that clip onto our iPads. We’ve been using them each week that she worked in our classroom. We really loved the predictions, investigations and checking of our results – we needed to think and work like Scientists. We investigated man made objects and materials and then ventured outside to look at nature.
Here we are learning outdoors – investigating nature.
Then we came back inside the classroom and shared our best nature images via the IWB.
The next learning task was to examine fabric and then test how waterproof specific materials were. We set up our material strips on plastic containers and then used syringes of water to test their ‘waterproofness’.
We continued our testing and started to record our findings.
Our final stage was to record our findings and we discussed what we’d discovered. We also need to explain our findings, giving reasons for our answers.
We LOVED using the digital microscopes and hope to use them again in the future.
Can you tell us why you liked using the microscopes?