We got to celebrate God’s perfect design whilst watching the growth of our caterpillars change into beautiful monarch butterflies.
In Term 3, the Kindy Blue students observed how our monarch caterpillars grew and changed into beautiful monarch butterflies.
The whole process of watching and waiting for metamorphosis to occur provides endless opportunities for observations, predictions, hypotheses, and of course, lots of excitement!
We followed the caterpillars as they munched through branches of leaves, growing roughly 2000% from the day they hatched until they were big enough to form their chrysalis.
The Kindy students were excited to apply their knowledge of pattern to the beautiful stripes on the caterpillars, leading into an exploration of all the different patterns in the world around us.
We marvelled as we watched each chrysalis change colour over two weeks, darkening from a bright green into black. There were some interesting colours and shapes occurring in the chrysalis. As the butterflies emerged into our classroom, we talked about how the wings of the butterfly slowly stretched out, and waved goodbye to them as they flew out of our doors to lay their own eggs.
In addition, we used our whole bodies to explore the idea of life cycles. We looked and listened to books and videos, used our bodies to act out the metamorphosis, used our creativity to represent the stages of the life cycle in drawing, as well as sequenced photos from our real butterflies alongside illustrations from ‘The Very Hunger Caterpillar’.
Beyond the purposes of scientific exploration, having live creatures in the classroom provided wonderful opportunities for rich discussion and social development around the areas of caretaking the Earth, showing responsibility, respecting God’s creation, and demonstrating self-regulation.
