creepy crawly fun

After coming back from Hawaii we started studying butterflies. We started by ordering painted lady caterpillars from Insect Lore. This was a great addition to our study. We have studied butterflies before (a couple of years ago) but by adding the caterpillars we actually studied caterpillars this time!

We started by reading this fabulous book we got at the library....
Creepy Crawly Caterpillars
I hadn't planned on getting this book. I had only searched by the term "butterfly", once again, totally forgetting the importance of studying caterpillars as well. But there it was, right next to the butterfly books so I grabbed it.

The first fun find was the illustration with the parts of a caterpillar. I asked the kids if they wanted to make a poster of the parts to hang up on the railing, thankfully, they said "yes"...
The title is cut off in the photo above because Clara wrote the word "caterpillar" herself and it's HUGE... taking up a section of paper as large as the caterpillar illustration.... sigh. I thought they did a really good job, even if there are a few more prolegs than there should be :-)

Yesterday when we were outside, the kids found this....

and they were so excited because they knew exactly what it was! And they knew it because they had seen it here...
It was in the Creepy Crawly Caterpillar book!

We still have a few more caterpillars to read about but now that our caterpillars look like this...
...we're going to be moving on to studying butterflies soon.

Watching our caterpillars turn into chrysalids was amazing. I mean it seriously happened right before our eyes. We had one stubborn one who fought the transformation with everything he had. He would climb up and then climb back down, up and down and finally when he climbed up and stayed up, he clung to the top with all of his legs instead of hanging like the rest of them. I guess even caterpillars are individuals! :-)

Okay... today is another day of testing... fun, fun!