It all started with the Very Hungry Caterpillar Day on March 20th. I sent off to for a free resource pack to VHCDAY@penguin.co.uk and recieved activity sheets, sunflower seeds, a tape measure, a giant sunflower poster, posters, stickers and notes.
I also made a sensory box for the little ones which contains counting bugs (caterpillars, butterflies, eggs etc to represent the life cycle of a butterfly), lacing cards, boxes, finger puppets, books on insects, photos of butterflies and various cards with information about plants and flowers. This box has been added to over the last few weeks as our project has developed.
We then bought a butterfly garden from Insect Lore and followed the instructions on how to raise our caterpillars!
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| Their food is all contained in the cup. |
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| They grew very fat, very quickly! |
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| Once the catterpillars have all moved to the top of the cup and formed chrysalides, you must transfer them to the Butterfly Garden. You get 5 caterpillars, but one of ours died. |
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| After about 2 weeks of watching our chrysalides, the butterflies emerged! |
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| The children named them- Harry, Barry, Ariel and Emily! |
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| You put flowers and leaves in the Butterfly Garden and make your own nectar from sugar and water to feed them. |
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| We kept the butterflies in the Butterfly Garden for about 2 weeks and then waited for a dry day to release them (Butterflies are like fairies- they don't go anywhere in the rain!) |
Fantastic! I'm very interested in these caterpillars, when my little ones are a bit bigger it is something that I'd definitely like to do with them.
ReplyDeleteI'll be sharing this post next Monday as one of my weekly favourite posts, so look out for it!