Our Caterpillars Arrived!

We began our insect life cycle unit last week by learning how to identify an insect. We sing a song to help us remember that insects have three body parts -a head, thorax, and abdomen. They have compound eyes, six legs and antennae too....and many insects have wings. Ask your child to sing it to you!
Your child will also tell you that insects are oviparous, and they go through a metamorphosis -they change from an egg to a caterpillar or larva, to a chrysalis or pupa and finally into a butterfly or adult insect. Miss Marlowe, our music therapist, taught us song about the insect life cycle that helps us remember that metamorphosis means to transform and change. There are a lot of science words that your child knows!
On Monday  we received a box...

Inside the box we found this...

We have 5 baby caterpillars! They are crawling and eating the green food on the bottom of their jar. We measured them and they were 1/2 inch long, but we think they will grow!
We learned that butterflies have a special  tube-like tongue called a proboscis. They uncurl their tongue to sip nectar from flowers. We hope to see our own butterflies do this when they emerge from the chrysalis stage. In the meantime, we became butterflies ourselves! We squeezed juice out of oranges (great fine motor activity!) and used fun straws to sip our nectar up!

While we continue observing our caterpillars, we will also be learning about other insects, such as lady bugs, bumblebees and fireflies.