We really know so much about caterpillars and their life cycle now. They start out as a little egg that’s sticky and sits on a leaf, until a little caterpillar crawls out.
Then it eats and eats and gets really big and then makes a chrysalis (like our caterpillars are in now! We saw that the chrysalises are brown, so we have the answer to that question some children asked). After a few weeks, it pushes itself out and is a butterfly!
We are finding new opportunities to extend these explorations every day.
Our caterpillars came in a little cup and we really enjoyed watching them crawl around and eat their food, but we know from observing caterpillars outside that caterpillars really like to live in a place with lots of dirt, leaves, and grass. So we decided to create a real caterpillar habitat.
We remembered the pictures of different caterpillars that we saw last week, and looked at them again, as well as a few other pictures, and of course the pictures we took outdoors, to notice what their environment looked like. We made a list of what we needed: grass, leaves, dirt, and rocks.
Then we headed outside to collect some nature!
We shoveled dirt and chose leaves and twigs. Some of the leaves had little round holes in them and we wondered if caterpillars had eaten through them, like in The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
When we came inside, we painted a box brown to use as the habitat. Next, we’ll put in everything we collected.
Also, here’s a sneak peek at our bonfire!
And one more sweet picture to end off.
