Caterpillar Update

We've been growing butterflies in our classroom the last couple of weeks. They started out as these little specs of caterpillars, and we watched them eat and eat and eat, and get fatter and fatter and fatter. However, with us all gone on spring break, some of the caterpillars decided to form their chrysalis without us! Luckily we have a talented photographer on our Kindergarten team: Mandi Taylor. She kindly took photos of the different stages that our caterpillars are currently in so the Kindergartners wouldn't miss any of the action. Please show these photos to your kindergartner.

 

First the Caterpillars attached themselves to the top of the cup. They then hung down into this J formation that you see above. That's how you know they're about to make a Chrysalis, when they drop into this pose. 

 Next they spun their chrysalis around themselves. Sometimes, as a protection, the chrysalis will shake and move, to try and scare away any other animals that might try to eat it. I saw this happening in the cup even, when other caterpillars would touch their fellow chrysalis.

This last picture shows all of our bigger caterpillars in the chrysalis stage (your child should remember that we had one cup with fat caterpillars, and one cup with baby caterpillars...this is the fat cup. We use the term "fat" with endearment. We discussed how they have to eat a ton and get big so that they have enough energy to change). These ones have been moved into our butterfly net with food and water so that when they hatch from the chrysalis they can fly around and live in here until it's time for us to release them into the wild. Hopefully they won't hatch until we get back so that the kids can see them like this first. But we have a second cup with 3 caterpillars that still have not formed their chrysalis, so odds are they'll get to see parts of this process again next week with our younger caterpillars.