Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Homeschooling - Butterfly Garden

I have a confession...
I love getting my kids educational items:
craft kits
science kits (of all kinds)
art kits

The problem is...finding the time to do them!
I always have better things to do.
I hate the way that sounds,
but no matter how many times they ask me to do them
there is something else that gets my attention:
laundry
dishes
dinner
all of these things can wait,
but they don't.
My kids wait...
but at the same time,
I am with them 24/7
I cannot be "with" them every second.

Last Christmas,
actually it may have been Christmas of 2011
ack!
no way!?!
thankfully I can't remember
so just for my sake,
we are going to say 
LAST Christmas
as in 
2012...

Either Jackson or the boys
received a 

You had to send off and purchase the larvae.
I was hoping to incorporate it into a butterfly unit,
so I seriously intentionally waited
and 
hoped that we could do a whole science unit
on it.
Never happened...
I could just never get my act together
and gather the materials
(meaning I didn't take 10 minutes to sit down
and find something on the internet that 
someone else had already done
and incorporate it)
BUT - 
I was hoping we would 
encounter it in our science books.
Sigh...
regardless,
I just never did it.
It didn't happen.

I finally got tired of telling 
my sweet child
"No, not right now"
and just ordered the caterpillars!
And I didn't tell him!

Here is how they looked when they arrived:

Day 1 - Oct 8, 2013

We put them on a shelf in our school room
and waited for them to attach themselves
to the top of the container
in their chrysalis.

 Day 6 - Oct 13, 2013

Once we noticed they were attached,

 We carefully transferred them,
 and the paper on the top of the cup that they had attached to,
to their habitat.



We put them back on a shelf,
and waited again...

Day 11 - Oct 18, 2013

We checked on them every day,
sometimes multiple times a day...
then finally on Day 11,
we saw our first butterfly had emerged!!


The excitement over these things emerging
was pretty surprising!


The rest of them emerged over the next few days.

We fed and kept them for a few days.
Almost a week.
Then after reading up,
I decided I didn't want to raise
butterflies for a living,
and I didn't want them dying
and the kids having issues with that.
So we decided to release them
when they were about a week old.






The kids really enjoyed that part,
and swore they wanted to stay with us,
since they weren't leaving.
But eventually they flew off into the 
great wide openness.

Then they found another pet
and tried to talk me into keeping it.



NOPE!!!

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